The Carl Beck
Papers Diana Greene in Russian & East European Studies The Menagerie or the Number 1803 Visitor’s Pass? Aleksandra Zrazhevskaia and Praskov’ia Bakunina on Russian Women Writers The Carl Beck Papers in Russian & East European Studies
Number 1803 Diana Greene
The Menagerie or the Visitor’s Pass? Aleksandra Zrazhevskaia and Praskov’ia Bakunina on Russian Women Writers Diana Greene is Slavic Studies Librarian at New York University’s Bobst Library. Her publications include Reinventing Romantic Poetry: Russian Women Writers of the Mid Nineteenth Century (2004), Women Writers in Russian Literature (1994), coedited with Toby Clyman, and Insidious Intent: An Interpretation of Fedor Sologub’s The Petty Demon (1986).
Image from cover: Appears on page 321 of Animal Art in the Public Domain, compiled by Harold H. Hart, Hart Publishing Company New York, 1983.
No. 1803, January 2007
© 2007 by The Center for Russian and East European Studies, a program of the University Center for International Studies, University of Pittsburgh
ISSN 0889-275X
The Carl Beck Papers Editors: William Chase, Bob Donnorummo, Ronald H. Linden Managing Editor: Eileen O’Malley Editorial Assistant: Vera Dorosh
Submissions to The Carl Beck Papers are welcome. Manuscripts must be in English, double-spaced throughout, and between 40 and 90 pages in length. Acceptance is based on anonymous review. Mail submissions to: Editor, The Carl Beck Papers, Center for Russian and East European Studies, 4400 Wesley W. Posvar Hall, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260. Abstract This article examines an 1842 literary exchange between Aleksandra Zra- zhevskaia (1805-1867) and Praskov’ia Bakunina (1810-1880?) concerning the place of women writers in nineteenth-century Russian literature. It is followed by a translation of the exchange itself. Zrazhevskaia’s “Zverinets” (The Menagerie), a formally innovative work of literary criticism addressed in part to Bakunina, challenged the social norms that discouraged women’s writing, as well as the men literary critics who enforced them. In a verse epistle response, Bakunina repudiated Zrazhevskaia’s ideas, maintaining that Russian men critics will extend hospitality and courtesy to women writers who comport themselves as guests in the men’s club of Russian letters. The exchange raises questions about the critical reception of women writers in mid nineteenth-century Russia, women as literary critics, and the gendering of nineteenth-century literary movements and aesthetics, which are discussed in relation to the wider pan-European liter- ary climate of the time.
1 In an 1842 literary exchange, Aleskandra Zrazhevskaia (1805–1867) and Praskov’ia Bakunina (1810–1880?) expressed opposing views about the place of women writers in nineteenth-century Russian literature. Zrazhevskaia’s “Zverinets” (The Menagerie), which appeared in the journal Maiak (t. 1, kn. 1, gl. 1, 1–18), and was in part addressed to Bakunina as a sister writer, strongly challenged the patriarchal social norms that discouraged women’s writing, as well as the men literary critics who enforced them.1 Zrazhevskaia troped men critics as wild beasts who pounce on hapless women writers in the menagerie of the Russian literary establishment. In a verse epistle response, “Otvet A. V. Zrazhevskoi,” which appeared in Moskvitianin (ch. 2, no. 3, 15–17), Bakunina repudiated Zrazhevskaia and her ideas. She will not, she writes, be recruited into Zrazhevskaia’s “Amazon regiment” to fi ght in a “War of Littérateurs” (21, 19).2 Such a war is ridiculous and unnecessary, she maintains, because Russian men critics will extend hospitality and courtesy to women writers who comport themselves as guests in the men’s club of Russian letters: . . . zapisnym poetom Ne dolzhno zhenshchine i byt’, Lish’ s posetitel’skim biletom Dolzhna v pechatnyi mir vkhodit’!— Gostiam privet i sniskhozhen’e; (29–33) [. . . a woman/Should not be a registered poet,/Only with a visitor’s pass/Should she enter the published world!/Guests are welcomed and indulged] Women who imagine that they can be great writers, Bakunina asserts, are delud- ing themselves with “sacrilegious dreams” (65). These two works provoke questions about the critical reception of women writers in mid-nineteenth-century Russia, women as literary critics, and the gendering of nineteenth-century literary movements and aesthetics. As we shall see, it will be useful to consider these questions not only in the context of Rus- sian literary history but also in relation to a wider, pan-European eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary climate, one with “weather patterns” extending to Russia and the United States as well. Maiak (The Lighthouse, 1840–1845), in which “The Menagerie” appeared, was a conservative journal where Zrazhevskaia worked as a staff writer and liter- ary critic. Her brother-in-law, Stepan Anisimovich Burachek, was its publisher
2 and editor (Dement’ev 291).3 In form, “The Menagerie” consists of two letters and, indeed, it is called “Two Letters” in the issue’s table of contents; the title “Zverinets” appears at the top of the work itself. The fi rst letter, dated June 28, 1836, fi ve years before its publication, serves as a kind of exposition. It is ad- dressed to Varvara Bakunina (1773–1840), Praskov’ia Bakunina’s mother, a travel and memoir writer, and also Zrazhevskaia’s godmother, to whom Zrazhevskaia pays tribute as the inspiration for her writing career.4 Zrazhevskaia, who had been separated from Bakunina since childhood, presents an account of her life as a writer up to that time. She describes her childhood enthusiasm for translat- ing and writing novels despite harsh parental discouragement, and recounts that, at the age of twenty-three, without her parents’ knowledge, she wrote a novel, dedicated it to the Empress Maria Fedorovna, and sent it to her. The empress responded with a gift and referred her to V. A. Zhukovsky (1783–1852), poet and tutor of the future Alexander II. Although Zhukovsky, like Zrazhevskaia’s parents, attempted to discourage her writing ambitions, Zrazhevskaia persevered with the help of a woman friend, identifi ed only by initials, fi nally succeeding in publishing a novel as well as translations of works by Balzac, Mme Emile de Girardin (Delphine Gay), and others. The letter closes with a brief description of critics’ attacks on her works and an expression of Zhrazevskaia’s desire to be reunited with Bakunina. The second part of “The Menagerie” is subtitled “A Short Course in Literary Zoology.” Dated October 10, 1841—fi ve years later, and a year after the death of Varvara Bakunina—this letter is addressed to Bakunina’s daughter, Praskov’ia Bakunina, a poet and friend of Zrazhevskaia’s. Here Zrazhevskaia develops and expands the theme that appeared at the end of the fi rst letter: critics’ antagonism toward her work and the work of women writers in general. In what is ostensibly a letter to a friend, Zrazhevskaia engages in feminist literary criticism, “writings about the work of women . . . that challenge patriarchal norms” (Lanser and Beck 80).5 Zrazhevskaia calls on women to write serious literature, so that there can be “women Goethes, Schillers, Shakespeares, Tassos, Klopstocks, Miltons, Dantes” (5). She then describes her recent literary activity and the diffi culties she has experienced as a woman writer. To illustrate her situation, she depicts three metaphorical encounters with misogynist critic-beasts in the menagerie of Russian literature, each of whom attacks her with an argument against women’s
3 writing. Zrazhevskaia presents herself debating wittily and passionately with each beast and triumphing over it—a verbal gladiator in serial combat. In the fi nal part of the letter, Zrazhevskaia offers Bakunina a satirical “literary zoology” of the various vicious and superfi cial beasts who inhabit the menagerie. She acerbically describes three genuses: pedantus, pretentious turkey-cocks who live in burrows with their rubbish; argumentatus, sluggish, nearsighted beasts divided into descriptive, narrative, and instructive species; and phrase-mongerus, the monkeylike followers of fads. Zrazhevskaia ends her literary zoology and letter here. In addition to their differences in content, the two letters of “The Menagerie” also differ greatly in tone and genre. Zhrazhevskaia writes to her godmother tenderly, respectfully, and almost worshipfully: “How I would like to see you! This sweet thought entices me and carries me far from the sphere in which I live. With childlike devotion, I await your reply” (4). The second letter, written to a friend and fellow writer, is often quite funny but more ambivalent in tone. As a well-published author and literary critic, Zhrazhevskaia feels she can chide her friend for not having sent her a promised epistle in verse. She also briefl y reviews Bakunina’s latest poem: “I read your “Thunderstorm” in Maiak and I liked the poem. Its direction is true and straight, its goal pure and radiant, its idea sublime” (5). Yet Zrazhevskaia is also aware that Bakunina, an upper-class young lady living at home, does not have to deal with the social and fi nancial problems that make her own life as a self-supporting woman writer so diffi cult. “It costs a great deal to publish at one’s own expense . . . but one can’t stop pub- lishing—or all one’s previous labors will be lost. . . . Surely this isn’t your fate? But you are in heaven. . . . You are in bliss—or at least you don’t have reason to complain about the battle of heavenly poetry with terrestrial materiality, while I . . .” (7, fi nal ellipsis in text). In addition, Zrazhevskaia seems to be aware that her increasing psychological problems alienate her from those around her, in- cluding Bakunina. “I ask people to love and pity me. . . . I do everything wrong, everything inside out, and I seem strange and unusual” (7). These diffi culties soon were to develop into mental illness. Zrazhevskaia mixes genres with originality, not only in “The Menagerie” as a whole, but in each of the two letters. Before proceeding, however, it is perhaps worth stating the obvious: “The Menagerie” does not consist of actual “letters.” While the fi rst letter may indeed have been based on one written to
4 Varvara Bakunina, in publishing it Zrazhevskaia has changed its addressee to Maiak’s readers, and, one would assume, revised it accordingly. The second “letter,” although nominally addressed to Praskov’ia Bakunina, and containing allusions to their friendship, was written specifi cally for publication. These are, in fact, prose epistles, or poslaniia, “a genre of lyric poetic work written in the form of an author’s communication [obrashchenie] to someone” (Vinogradov, 3: 572). The second, in its fl attering references to Bakunina’s poetry, more specifi cally resembles a “friendly” or “familiar” epistle, a poetic genre typical of the Russian “cult of friendship” (Mirsky 84, 72).6 The genre of “The Menag- erie” in its entirety has been variously characterized as an “epistolatory essay,” an “autobiographical allegorical satire,” and an “essay-lampoon” (Savkina, Provintsialki 165, Nikolaev, 359, Fainshtein 135). The two epistles, however, contain different generic elements. While the fi rst, recounting Zrazhevskaia’s “coming to writing” (Cixous, “Coming to Writing”), can be said to resemble a (female) Bildungsroman (Savkina, Provintsialki 165), the second includes elements of autobiography, fi ction, fantasy, satire, and philippic.7 Some literary historians consider such mixed-genre autobiographical writing typical of women authors.8 A later nineteenth-century Russian woman literary critic, Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaia (pseudonym V. Krestovskii, 1824–1889), also wrote critical essays that were “stylistically innovative, often taking the form of a dialogue, letter or fi ctionalized essay” (Gheith 104). Above all, however, “The Menagerie” must be characterized as feminist literary criticism, as defi ned above. Zrazhevs- kaia challenges “patriarchal norms” by discussing women’s writing in relation to the social constraints that women writers face: lack of access to education, exclusion from public life, and indiscriminate attacks by men critics who both disparage women’s “nature” and dismiss women’s experience as a valid subject for literature (Savkina, Provintsialki 45–46). Zrazhevskaia has justifi ably been called the fi rst Russian feminist critic (Savkina, Provintsialki 45). Bakunina, in her response, “Answer to A. V. Zrazhevskaia’s Letter (A Short Course in Literary Zoology) Published in Maiak, no. 1, 1842,” which appeared in the Slavophile journal Moskvitianin, expresses irritation that Zrazhevskaia, who knows her street address, sent her a letter in a journal rather than through the mail. She ridicules Zrazhevskaia for deludedly doing battle “like Don Quixote” (17). In any case, she adds,
5 Za chem na trud i na uchen’e Zaniat’ia legkie meniat’? (37–38) [Why exchange light occupations/For labor and study?”] Intellectual endeavors, Bakunina asserts, are “not our destiny” (49): Ne budet geniem—kto khochet; Zhelan’em—slavy ne uprochit’, (55–56) [Not everyone who wants to will be a genius,/ Desire doesn’t ensure glory] Zrazhevskaia is only making herself feel unhappy and alienated by harboring unrealistic ambitions; God does not intend women to be geniuses. The “great, dif- fi cult path is not for us” (67). Zrazhevskaia should write to Bakunina “simply, and by mail,/And without incomprehensible beasts” (101–02). Bakunina complains that the “journalistic arguments” of the literary zoology bored her. And, she adds, it will bore the readers of Maiak as well. “Tell me,” she concludes, “to whom is it interesting/To read about the unknown life of/Unremarkable people!” (17). It may seem ironic that Bakunina, who claims to have been embarrassed to receive a letter in print from Zrazhevskaia, expresses her objections to her in a published reply. However, Bakunina’s derisive epistle might well represent her response to Zrazhevskaia’s demand at the beginning of her letter for a (friendly) verse epistle: “My dearest friend, you are in debt to me—I am waiting for a verse epistle [poslanie v stikhakh] from you; you promised to dedicate a few pages to me” (5). “Here,” Bakunina sardonically seems to say, “is your verse epistle.”
The Depiction of Literary Polemics Between Women It would be very easy for a feminist literary historian to create a “binary hierarchical opposition” (Cixous, “Sorties” 101–02) between Zrazhevskaia and Bakunina—to valorize Zrazhevskaia while demonizing or patronizing Bakunina. Zrazhevskaia after all, mounted the barricades of feminist criticism by challenging the male literary establishment in “The Menagerie” and other articles.9 She also arouses our sympathy as a victim of a patriarchal society. Although she depicts herself as beginning to feel successful as a writer despite her constant struggles with poverty and a hostile literary establishment, just a year after “The Menagerie” appeared she fell silent as she started to display symptoms of mental illness. Like
6 Virginia Woolf’s Judith Shakespeare, William Shakespeare’s hypothetical sister in A Room of One’s Own, she can be said to have perished through “absence of material support—no education, no money; [men’s] ideological antipathy . . . ; and the psychological consequences of this situation—the self-doubt, the remorse, the fear” as well as through “patronizing, scathing, or anxiously self-protective” male criticism (Eagleton, 7). Bakunina, on the other hand, whose published poetry depicts woman as completely subservient to man and God,10 in regard to feminism can be said to have stayed in the closet. Only in her unpublished poetry does she write with pride about her vocation as a poet or create a play- ful, folkloric, woman-centered literary-pagan alternative to the devout, joyless Christianity of her published work (Greene, “Praskov’ia Bakunina”). As a feminist literary historian, however, I am suspicious of binary opposi- tions, especially when applied to nineteenth-century women, whom men writers and critics routinely depicted as “dark” or “fair,” virgins or whores.11 In literary criticism we see such oppositions in what Barbara Johnson calls the “‘divide and conquer’ school of criticism”—critics “singling out one woman writer, prais- ing her extravagantly, and using her as a pretext to denigrate the work of other women” (164, italics Johnson’s). Similarly, Tricia Lootens compares literary historians to “judges in a beauty pageant” who “accord real victory only to one ‘queen’” (161). Such critics, when they were not elevating the “extraordinary” woman writer to the status of an honorary man,12 depicted her as merely the best representative of the “species,” the unspoken assumption of this botanical or taxonomical criticism being that “if you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all” (Greene, Reinventing 102). Zrazhevskaia’s literary zoology of men critics turned the tables on practitioners of this approach. But while for the modern feminist critic, Zrazhevskaia’s outrageous irrever- ence toward patriarchal literary authority may be more gratifying than Bakunina’s tactical primness, a dualistic approach to these two writers would only limit our view. One is reminded of Margaret Ezell’s cautions to those feminist scholars who “seek the outcast, the model madwoman, the angry voice” (103), that we must “let the past be the past” (8) and “exist as different from the present” (13), rather than impose our own feminist judgments and evolutionary schemes on past women writers, “a progressivist vision of literary history which forces one to negate or condemn earlier periods’ writing in order to praise that of the pres- ent” (103).
7 Certainly, Bakunina’s response to “The Menagerie” becomes more under- standable in the context of her life. Her family, while providing her with many literary contacts and role models,13 occupied a “decentered” (Kaplan 3) posi- tion in upper-class Russian society, outside the mainstream politically and even legally. Her fi rst cousin was the revolutionary anarchist Mikhail Bakunin.14 Her brother Vasilii was a Decembrist who only escaped trial through the intervention of Nicholas I (Mironenko 12). Her father, Mikhail, a governor of St. Petersburg, general, and senator, was accused in 1818 of “improperly dispersing the funds of the Department of Social Charity,” as a result of which he lost his position as senator and was involved in a ruinous lawsuit that dragged on into Nicholas’s reign. The family went abroad for several years and eventually settled in Moscow, where Mikhail Mikhailovich lived out his life as a “private person” (“chastnym chelovekom,” Kornilov 5; Greene, “Praskov’ia Bakunina” 45, 55 n. 12, 56 n. 14). While such infl uences and stresses might have created a writer who challenged both political and social conventions, Praskov’ia Bakunina, perhaps not surpris- ingly, developed in the opposite direction. She seems to have had a great need to present herself in her published poetry as an unexceptionable and irreproachable poetess, who strongly supported the religious and gender orders. In addition, Zrazhevskaia in “The Menagerie” had given Bakunina several possible grounds for anger. Bakunina may have felt that Zrazhevskaia had vio- lated her privacy in publishing letters to her mother and to her that contained personal information. She may have perceived Zrazhevskaia’s praise of her poetry as condescending. And she may have resented being included in Zrazhevskaia’s feminist critique of Russian literature and lampooning of men critics—activities of which Bakunina disapproved.15
Men’s Critical Reception of Women’s Writing in Russia and Europe Both Zrazhevskaia in “The Menagerie” and Bakunina in her response ad- dress the position of women writers in Russian literature. To better understand that position, it will be useful, as suggested above, to bring into our discussion the larger cultural climate in which literary trends such as Sentimentalism, Ro- manticism, Realism—or Romantic Realism (Fanger)—moved across Europe, Russia, and the United States.16 8 One such trend, which started in England in the late eighteenth century and reached Russia in the 1820s and 1830s, was the professionalization of litera- ture—a development that transformed literary institutions and relations, includ- ing the reception of women writers (Ross 22, 26–27). The economic basis of literature changed, the site of literary production shifting from the “polite society” of aristocratic salons to “plebian” commercial publishing (Todd 70–105). As a result, a literary market—the book trade and commercial journals—replaced the earlier patronage system of noblemen, academies, subscription lists, and “familiar associations” (Todd 51, 61) such as literary circles and salons. It would be naïve to consider the preceding age of salons and Sentimental- ism in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Europe and Russia a Golden Age for women’s participation in literature. Some late eighteenth-century men reviewers of women’s works “gallantly” extended “mercy to what [they] took to be generically inferior writing,” while women authors in return usually felt it necessary to invoke the “modesty topos” in their introductions, denigrating or apologizing for their work in the hopes of forestalling critical attacks (Donoghue 160, 161; Mellor, Romanticism 8; Tompkins 116). And unlike men writers, these women writers always risked having their works, and themselves, sexualized and belittled by men reviewers in what today we would understand as sexual harassment.17 As early as 1796 an English reviewer addressed a woman author with a condescending paraphrase of Jesus’ words to the woman taken in adultery, thus equating her act of publishing a novel with an illicit sexual act: “Be a good girl; do so no more; and we will say nothing about it this time” (Tompkins 16). In Russia in 1804 Vladimir Izmailov translated and published in his journal The Patriot (Patriot) a French essay stating that “a woman in print is the same as a woman of ill-repute, whose adventures are common knowledge”; in a footnote he “applauds the author’s sentiments” (Vowles 39).18 Nonetheless, some European salon hostesses of the time were able to provide opportunities for women writers to make their works known to “polite society,” perhaps encouraging Russian salon hostesses and poets by their example. In France Mme Récamier used her salon to launch a career for the poet Delphine Gay and arranged for Elisa Mercoeur and Marceline Desbordes-Valmore to re- ceive considerable fi nancial and career assistance (Balde 17, Greenberg 26–28). In England, the Bluestocking Circle, which consisted primarily of women, sup- ported each other’s intellectual endeavors (Myers). And in Russia, the young
9 Karolina Pavlova read her works in the salons of Zinaida Volkonskaia and Avdot’ia Elagina (Rapgof, 6, 12). However, with the rise, fi rst in Europe, then in Russia, of journals and publishing culture, men literary gatekeepers (Spender 16)—editors, reviewers, publishers, booksellers—took virtually complete control of the means of liter- ary production and distribution. In order to publish their work, women now had to turn to these men for mentoring, encouragement, advice, and assistance. Frequently, however, the responses seemed designed to discourage them, as Charlotte Brontë, Emily Dickinson, and Maria Jewsbury discovered in their respective dealings with Robert Southey, then poet laureate of England, Thomas Higginson of the Atlantic Monthly, and William Wordsworth. Southey, for ex- ample, wrote in an 1837 letter to Brontë, who had sent him some of her poems for his opinion, “Literature cannot be the basis of a woman’s life and it ought not be” (Gaskell 111).19 In this context, the discouraging advice that Zhrazhevskaia received in 1828–1829 from the equally eminent Vasilii Zhukovsky, and which she recounts in “The Menagerie,” is not that surprising. Zhukovsky, she writes, told her that “authorship removes women from their quiet sphere, that all women-writers constitute exceptions and pay very dearly for their glittering fame; that this is something that would infl uence my entire life; that thousands of unpleasantnesses are connected with authorship” (3). It should be noted that Zhukovsky generously supported men writers, at various times mentoring and intervening politically for Pushkin, Tiutchev, Lermontov, Baratynsky, Khomiakov, the poverty-stricken Siberian civil servant Evgenii Mil’keev, and the Voronezh cattle dealer Aleksei Kol’tsov (Greene, Reinventing 34–35, 170, 233 n. 35). Zrazhevskaia was not imagining men critics’ hostility toward women writers; the Romantic era in Russia and Europe has often been described as an unfriendly environment for such women.20 By the 1830s, even the condescending “criti- cal lenity” (Donoghue 161) of the eighteenth century toward women’s literary works had disappeared; many critics now blatantly equated women’s writings with sexual display (Catriona Kelly, History 75) and published women authors with prostitutes (Gallagher; Vincent 39–40). For example, in the short story “Zhenshchina-pisatel’nitsa” (The Woman Writer, 1837), by Rakhmannyi (N. N. Verevkin), a work that Zrazhevskaia al- ludes to with indignation in “The Menagerie” (9), the narrator distinguishes
10 between impoverished “mothers” (good women) who write out of fi nancial need and “vain” women (prostitutes) who, like men, write out of literary ambition. “I respect a mother who by means of her pen feeds her unfortunate children, and sometimes also her ailing or incapable husband . . . but women who without any need, simply from vanity, descend to authorship and want to shine in society with their face and their prose, with their little feet and with their verse, with their shoulders and in odes, such women I call . . .” (Rakhmannyi 30–31, fi nal ellipsis in text). Similarly, Vissarion Belinsky, Russia’s most famous critic, in an 1835 review of a translated French novel (Une victime: esquisse littéraire by Mme B. Monborne) writes: “‘Une femme emancipée’ is a term which could be very accurately translated by one Russian word, and it’s too bad that its use is permitted in some dictionaries, although not in all, but only in the most com- prehensive. I will only add that a ‘woman writer’ in a certain sense is ‘la femme emancipée” (Provintsialki 36). In both Europe and Russia several interlinked factors may account for men’s more directly expressed antagonism toward women writers during the Roman- tic period. First is the Romantic movement itself, described by Gary Kelly as “the remasculinization of writing which subsumed the literature of sensibility, appropriated ‘feminine’ themes, styles and genre, combined them with conven- tionally ‘masculine’ discourses normally barred to women, such as philosophy, scholarship, satire, and the erotic, and as a result restricted women to even more subaltern discourses” (3).21 A second factor was the conservative backlash against the American and French revolutions—especially the Reign of Terror—as well as against the potentially socially leveling effects of these events.22 Socially, sexually, or in- tellectually powerful women, who were perceived as challenging the gender hierarchy—perhaps as great a threat to many men as challenges to the political order—were reviled. One thinks of Balzac’s sarcastic treatment of Mme de Staël in Louis Lambert (1832), British caricatures of Bluestockings as French Revo- lutionaries (Delinger 28–29), Byron’s "The Blues: A Literary Eclogue" (1821), and Pushkin’s well-known, disdainful comment in Evgenii Onegin (3:28) about intellectual women. Ne dai mne bog soitis’ na bale Il’ pri raz”ezde na kryl’tse S seminaristom v zheltoi shale
11 Il’ s akademikom v cheptse! [God forbig that at a ball/ Or on the porch as I am leaving/ I should meet a seminarian in a yellow shawl/ Or and academician in a woman’s cap!] A third, economically based factor in men’s denigration of women writers at this time was an attempt to limit competition. In Europe, the United States, and Russia women were experiencing great fi nancial success in the new and lucra- tive, albeit unprestigious, literary marketplace of novels, literary annuals, and women’s journals, much to the disgust of some less successful literary men.23
Women as Literary Critics: Zrazhevskaia and Feminist Literary Criticism In such a literary atmosphere, Zrazhevskaia—who was also a novelist and translator—is extraordinary in the 1840s for writing and publishing criticism, a fi eld that presented even more obstacles for women than did literature.24 In the essentializing nineteenth century, women were considered incapable of the “masculine” powers of “logic, judgment [and] the ability to abstract” necessary for literary criticism—while being condemned as unfeminine if they demonstrated them (Lanser and Beck 79). Catriona Kelly (“Missing Links” 72) writes of the “gender-marked connotation of ‘analysis,’” which since the eighteenth century in Russia has made “criticism a mental activity incompatible with femininity.” Traditional prejudices against women as “thinker or theoretician,” “critic, theory- builder or judge” received support from St. Paul’s injunction: “Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach nor to usurp authority over the man but to be in silence” (1 Timothy 2:11–12)—a text appearing frequently in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English-language domestic conduct books.25 While by the 1860s in Russia public discussion of zhenskii vopros (the wom- an question) allowed a few pioneers such as Mariia Tsebrikova, Evgeniia Tur, and Mariia Vernadskaia to write literary criticism without using male pseudonyms, the taboo against Russian women literary critics survived through the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth. For example, Stepan Dudyshkin, an editor of Otechestvennye zapiski, who urged Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaia to publish her prose fi ction under her own name instead of under her male pseudonym, 12 V. Krestovsky, nonetheless, in a letter inviting her to write a column of literary criticism for the journal in 1861, added, “You would take another pseudonym (a man’s of course).”26 Until 1917 the poet Sofi ia Parnok (1885–1933) wrote criti- cism under the male pseudonym Andrei Polianin (Ledkovsky et al. 486), and as late as the 1930s the poet and prose writer Zinaida Gippius (1869–1945) wrote literary criticism in émigré journals using the name Anton Krainyi and other the male pseudonyms (Pachmuss 381, 305–83).27 It is quite remarkable, then, that in the early 1840s, Zhrazhevskaia not only wrote literary criticism under her own name but did so from what can only be called a feminist point of view. In “The Menagerie” and other literary criticism Zrazhevskaia celebrates women’s writing and rejects men critics’ literary assumptions, thus making women writers, not men, the measure of her aesthetic. But while Zrazhevskaia’s narrator, in debating with the three misogynist male critic-beasts, theorizes literature from a woman-centered perspective, she does so differently than would many twenty-fi rst-century feminists. For example, the fi rst beast asks, “What can a woman write?” invoking the sexual double standard in order to exclude women from literature. Women cannot write, he explains, because if they depict “passions” they imply that they have sexual experience, thus becoming outcasts in a society that required women, but not men, to appear both chaste and demure. A twenty-fi rst-century feminist might attack the double standard itself, asserting that women have just as much right as men to write about passions; Zrazhevskaia’s persona does not. Rather, she turns the beast’s argument around, maintaining that when men write about “passions,” they, no less than women, reveal and shame themselves—but as sexual predators. She replies to the fi rst beast: I can . . . read my fi ll of your unfortunate stories in which you, imagining yourselves the only masters and inhabitants of the earth, so insatiably and with such pleasure, with such love, with such bragging about your detailed knowledge, depict only the passionate, the passionate and the passionate—both in prose and in verse. . . . If only you could understand, Messieurs Little Beasts, how unforgivably you all, all without exception, act toward us, the friends and companions of your earthly existence, you would be horrifi ed! You would not demand from women writers your materialistic expertise! (8–9)
13 One is reminded of Joan Scott’s discussion of two feminist paradigms: “equality” (there is no meaningful difference between men and women) and “difference” (women are different from men) (174–75, 196–97).28 In “The Me- nagerie” Zrazhevskaia, like many nineteenth-century feminists—and twentieth- century cultural feminists29—argues that women are not only different from, but in some ways better than men. Zrazhevskaia, I would suggest, in “The Menagerie” places herself in a women-centered critical tradition recently recovered by literary historians: be- tween 1790 and 1850 several women critics and writers across Europe opposed the androcentric and misogynist aspects of Romanticism and Realism that were often presented as aesthetic principles. Anne Mellor has shown that during the Romantic period in England (1780–1830) “the leading women literary critics . . . upheld an aesthetic theory different from but as coherent as those developed by Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Hazlitt, Keats, Percy Shelly, and their male peers.” Like men’s Romanticism, this woman’s aesthetic was utopian and revo- lutionary, but rather than violent political revolutions, it advocated a revolution in gender relations, starting with equal education for women and equal rights for them in marriage. These women critics often “dismissed [Romantic poets] as amoral, self-indulgent, or incomprehensible” or even as “harsh, turgid,” and “disgusting” (Mellor, “Criticism” 31).30 Similarly, Margaret Cohen (54) describes the nineteenth-century novel as taking shape in a struggle between a women’s sentimental aesthetic, based on knowledge of the heart, and a man’s realistic one, the latter only triumphing by 1850. “Sentimental social novels by women were overwhelmingly concerned with women’s issues,” Cohen writes, including “women’s status as second class citizens, their restriction to the private sphere and their sufferings in unhappy and indissoluble marriages,” while “Realism’s representation of social truth was deeply bound up in a masculine investigation of transgressive, feminine sexuality” (63, 64). Naomi Schor also discusses a mid-nineteenth-century struggle between two “representational modes”: George Sand’s Idealism, now “discarded” (59), and Balzac’s triumphant Realism. Realism, associated with masculinity, she writes, “constructs and supports the phallo- and ethnocentric social order we so often confuse with reality” (80). That is, Realism represents a “social construction of reality” (Berger and Luckmann); it creates and refl ects a consensual reality not
14 always in the best interests of gender and racial “others.” Sand, in her novels of Idealism, in which “the quest for the love ideal is inseparable from an aspiration toward an ideal world,” refused “to reproduce mimetically, and hence legitimate a social order inimical to the disenfranchised, among them women”(69). Because Sand rejected Realism, Schor argues, her novels have been “decanonized.” Both Sand and Balzac played a prominent role in Russian literature dur- ing the 1830s and 1840s. Sand, despite attacks on her in the press as immoral (Herrmann 17), greatly infl uenced such men writers as Belinsky, Dostoevsky, Druzhinin, Herzen, and later Chernyshevsky, as well as such women writers as Gan, Rostopchina, and later Panaeva and Tur. During this time, however, Balzac’s popularity and infl uence in Russia were at their height. Between 1830 and 1834 eight editions of his short stories were published in Russia (Shepard 124), and his fame reached a new pinnacle during his three-month stay in St. Petersburg in 1843 (Grossman 12–13, 16–18). Whether or not because of Balzac’s infl uence, Realism, as described by Schor, took hold in Russia at this time—both in the “natural school,” which, one literary historian writes, “reveals society’s ulcers” by deliberately focusing on “dark, dirty and depressing aspects of life” (Kuleshov 94), and in the “physiological sketch” (fi ziologicheskii ocherk) which centered on a “typical,” virtually always male, representative of a social class.31 Originally a French genre that combined journalism and fi ction, the ocherk became known in Russia through such works as Balzac’s Physiologie du mariage (1829) (Greene, “Gender” 569–70). Both the natural school and the ocherk ignored women, while in fi ctional depictions of women of the time, the “terrible perfection” (Heldt) of conventional heroines was often counterbalanced by representations of disgust- ing hags or titillating femmes fatales and “fallen” women.32 Zrazhevskaia both as a literary critic and also as the Russian translator of Balzac’s Louis Lambert (1832)33 was well aware of the depiction of “passions” in contemporary literature. Balzac’s novel recounts the destruction of its virginal philosopher-protagonist, who, unable to reconcile sexual passion with his phi- losophy, writes his fi ancée a series of increasingly disturbed and erotic letters and becomes insane shortly before his wedding. In “The Menagerie,” Zrazhevskaia joined her European sisters in contesting a literary culture that marginalized and denigrated women, women’s experience, and women writers. But beyond criticizing the content of men’s writing, Zrazhevskaia criticizes its aesthetic basis, arguing that women’s aesthetics are different from and superior
15 to men’s. From the eighteenth century, men aestheticians such as Joshua Reynolds and Edmund Burke had contrasted the Sublime, a privileged aesthetic category, which they gendered as masculine, with the Beautiful, which they trivialized and gendered as feminine.34 Here again, Zrazhevskaia does not argue on the basis of “equality” that women writers too should seize the Sublime. Rather she extols the Beautiful as women’s superior realm. “Passions are far from constituting the beautiful,” she writes. “You sovereigns of knowledge, wisdom, strength, and reason fi nd pleasure in describing only the passionate, the passionate, and the bestial” (9). She maintains that men’s focus on ugly passions in their writ- ing is an extension of their abuse of women in society. Women who write about the beautiful can produce literary works superior to men’s depictions of violent passions: “You [men] don’t even guess that true life still remains untouched [by men authors]; and that a sensitive woman, dedicated and loving—boldly and legitimately can seize the entire trophy of the beautiful. . . . Enjoy your passions; and let women delight people by painting the beautiful and by returning to the humiliated, defi led world its beauty, purity and holiness (9).” Zrazhevskaia expresses similar views in two important critical articles that she published the same year as “The Menagerie.” In her review of M. I. Zagoskin’s Kuzma Petrovich Miroshev (1842), she cautions Russian writers against the infl uence of Western Romanticism (83–84, 120), which she describes as deliberately inciting passions and “mocking everything good as ridiculous.” The “continuous passion,” of Western Romanticism, she writes, constitutes hell (83). In “Russkaia narodnaia povest’” (1842), a review of O. P. Shishkina’s historical novel Kniaz’ Skopin-Shuiskii, she contrasts Russian men writers who are attracted to “Western tinsel” (zapadnaia mishurnost’), exemplifi ed by the Romantic historical novels of Walter Scott, with Shishkina, “a Russian woman who is the fi rst to write a true Russian tale” of gold (146–47, 151). She complains that Shishkina’s novel, which had appeared seven years previously, was ignored by Russian men reviewers, who, in their deluded admiration of European de- pictions of passions and illicit love, could not appreciate the “reason, sincerity, warmth, truth, and simplicity” which constitute the Russianness of Shishkina’s novel (146, 147, 149, 151). Zrazhevskaia’s second beast asks, “Why have there been no women . . . geniuses?” (9), arguing that women do not have the intellectual capacity to write great works. In answering him Zrazhevskaia again places herself in a pan-Eu-
16 ropean women’s critical tradition—the discussion of women’s education and capacity for genius. Genius, one scholar shows, had been gendered as masculine since the eighteenth century (Battersby); both Rousseau and Belinsky declared women incapable of being geniuses (DeJean 120; Belinsky, “Zhertva” 225). Such opinions of women’s mental capabilities were disputed by Mary Wollstonecraft in “A Vindication of the Rights of Women” (1792), where she argued that girls should be given the same educational opportunities as boys. Mme de Staël in Corinne (1807) depicts a woman poet of genius for whom there is no place in European society. In “The Menagerie” the narrator, a “stylized” Zrazhevskaia,35 in answering the second beast, similarly points to women’s defi cient upbringing, inadequate education, and lack of rigorous, systematic training in the arts and sciences. If girls were trained to use their minds from childhood, she says, and if there were women’s universities, there would be as many women geniuses as men. But, she continues, even when women of genius, like Mme de Staël and the Russian poet Anna Bunina (1774–1828), manage to triumph over circum- stances, men persecute them. Karolina Pavlova would argue similarly about the defi ciencies of girls’ education in “Za chainym stolom” (At the Tea Table, 1859, 799). When asked to defi ne “authorship,” Zrazhevskaia’s persona answers, “thinking, feeling, and power,” which she fi nds equally in women and men. To prove her point she presents a survey of excellent writing by contemporary Russian women. The third beast argues that women have no business writing and therefore should not be surprised if men ignore or refuse to review their books. “Whose fault is it if you took it into your head to be an author and imitate us?” he says. “Endure your just punishment” (14). Refusing to be shamed for seeking fame, the narrator points out that women, no less than men, long for a place in history. In a society that denies upper-class women any other career, writing constitutes the only avenue open to them.
The Closet or the Barricades? While Zrazhevskaia mounted the barricades in “The Menagerie,” Bakunina in her reply remained in the closet. Praskov’ia Bakunina during her lifetime pub- lished twelve well-crafted poems and a few prose works. She also left a notebook of unpublished poetry (Stikhotvoreniia), almost all written in the 1830s, much
17 of it less devout and more original than her published works. It may be signifi - cant that the last poem in this notebook is her verse epistle to Zrazhevskaia, in which she refuses to question publicly the social system that constrained her. Bakunina was right in her epistle to Zrazhevskaia: by not challenging the status quo or men critics, she did, indeed, receive kinder treatment. A reviewer of the literary annual Raut (Fashionable Assembly, 1851), in which one of Bakunina's poems appeared (“Nad Koreizom nebo iasno” [The sky is clear above Koreiz]), wrote of her, “all her poems are distinguished by soft feeling and by poetry in large part religious in direction. Her verses are a mirror of a pure, calm soul. . . . Her talent is wonderful; . . . God grant us more verses with such content . . . in an age of troubled evil and self-interest, we need calm feelings” (“Kritika,” 158–59). In the 1850s Bakunina’s poetry became increasingly religious and doctrinaire as well as less interesting textually. At the beginning of the 1860s she left literature entirely and moved with her two sisters to an estate in Tver’ that they had inherited from an aunt (Nikolaev 1: 145, Sinitsyn 216–19). There she and her sisters, one of whom, Ekaterina, had served as a nurse in the Crimean War, opened the fi rst clinic for peasants. Bakunina died around 1880. Zrazhevskaia published nothing after 1843. After 1846, when her mental illness, possibly schizophrenia, worsened, she lived fi rst with her sister, then with her mother in St. Petersburg, and fi nally in insane asylums from 1861 until her death in 1867. She reportedly fi nished her second novel, Zhenskii vek (The Woman’s Era)—it may have been a chapter of this which she published in Moskvitianin in 1842 under the title “A Woman Poet and Author: An Excerpt from a Novel”)36—but the manuscript was later destroyed (Russkii biografi cheskii slovar’ 8:496). Zrazhevskaia’s achievements as Russia’s fi rst feminist critic nonetheless are signifi cant. In the early 1840s she championed Russian women writers, refuting the general belief that women were intellectually inferior to men, incapable of genius or of equaling men’s literary accomplishments. Zrazhevskaia may have found the strength to challenge her society’s beliefs about women and literature by allying herself with a pan-European tradition of feminist critical thought, fi nd- ing models and sisterhood in the examples of European women writers. In “The Menagerie” she writes of her desire to become a Russian Mme de Staël—who, like Zrazhevskaia, wrote both novels and criticism. Zhrazhevskaia allied herself with a supportive community of European women writers by translating into
18 Russian an article by the French poet Amable Tastu (1798–1885) praising the English poet Felicia Hemans (1793–1835) (“Felitsiia Gimens”). Lacking per- sonal contacts with such women, however, Zrazhevskaia might have found this “imagined community” rather tenuous.37 Zrazhaevskaia’s feminist criticism, like that advocated by Lanser and Beck, strove to base itself in an “autonomous woman-centered epistemology” and an aesthetic that “places ourselves at the center of our thinking.” However, such an aesthetic, as they point out, can only be developed and expressed when “women are freed from economic, psychological, and social dependence on men” (86, 89). Zrazhevskaia could not have survived or published without her brother-in-law, Stepan Burachek, who allowed her to work as a staff writer and literary critic at Maiak. But while she thereby became the only woman in Russia at the time with a public platform—one that she used for feminist criticism—she would not have been allowed to stray too far from Maiak’s nationalistic political line had she wanted to. Zrazhevskaia was similarly dependent on the men editors of the other dependent journals that published her works. One can only speculate what she might have written had this not been the case. Other questions arise for me as well: Did Zrazhevskaia’s rejection of what to her was an intolerable “consensual reality” in regard to women—did the isolation she may have experienced in fi nding no refl ection of her views in her society—play a part in her mental illness? Or was it perhaps her developing mental illness that allowed her to question her society’s deeply held assump- tions—in R. D. Laing’s terms to let “the light . . . break through the cracks” of the literary establishment’s “all too closed minds” (90)? And did Bakunina’s compliance with a literary system that marginalized women eventually silence her and cause her to leave literature completely? In the end, neither Zrazhevskaia’s confrontational challenge to the patriar- chal literary establishment nor Bakunina’s public self-effacement, appeasement, and defense of it proved effective. In the chilly literary climate for women that prevailed in mid- nineteenth-century Russia, neither Zrazhevskaia nor Bakunina could fl ourish as writers.
19 Notes My thanks to Dawn Lawson, Clare Hills-Nova, John Randolph, Marcus Levitt, and especially Sibelan Forrester for very helpful comments and suggestions. The librarians of the Slavic Reading Room of the University of Illinois at Urbana helped me obtain hard-to-fi nd research material, as did Harry Leich, and Ann Kleimola.
1. The terms “men critics” and “men poets” may at fi rst strike the ear as strange, unlike the parallel terms, “women critics”/“women poets,” which are standard. Perhaps the former seem tautological; critics and poets are assumed to be men. When specifi ed as men, poets and critics are generally referred to as “male,” a word that draws attention to their biological sexual identity—as is clear from the parallel, but less commonly encountered, “female poets,”/“female critics.” It would appear that women have been so sexualized—throughout the nineteenth century, for example, women were referred to as “the sex” (“sex” 1e, Oxford English Dictionary Online)—that the word “woman” carries many more sexual connotations than does the word “man.” “Male poets/ critics” therefore is felt to be the equivalent of “women poets/critics.” In this article I use the parallel constructions “men poets/critics” and “women poets/critics.”
2. All translations are mine unless otherwise indicated. Here and subsequently, quotations from Bakunina’s verse epistle are followed by the line number in parentheses.
3. On Zrazhevskaia see Russkii biografi cheskii slovar’, 494–97, which includes a bibliography of her articles (496), also Nikolaev, 2: 358–60, and Fainshtein 125–37. Nikolaev (359) states that at Maiak Zrazhevskaia “shar[ed] in many ways the job of its editor S. A. Burachek.” During the Soviet era, the journal was characterized as “an organ of militant obscurantism [mrakobesie]. All the material of the literary section was steeped in the spirit of ‘offi cial nationality’” (Dement’ev 291). Zrazhevskaia, while publicly identifying herself with Maiak’s anti-Western stance (“Kuzma” 8), used it, as we shall see, to promote Russian women’s writing.
4. On Varvara Bakunina and her daughter Praskov’ia, see Ledkovsky 52–55.
5. The Oxford English Dictionary defi nes feminism as “advocacy of the rights of women, based on the theory of equality of the sexes.” While, as Gheith (242 n. 65) points out, the word “feminist” did not appear until the end of the nineteenth century, it can be usefully applied to people who expressed such ideas earlier. This is also true for the term “feminist literary criticism.”
6. It is not surprising that Zrazhevskaia should write a prose work in a poetic genre. During the 1830s and 1840s in Russia we fi nd similar Romantic genre play between poetry and prose in Pushkin’s “roman v stikhakh” (novel in verse) Evgenii Onegin (1823–1830); Belinsky’s “elegiia v proze” (elegy in prose) “Literaturnye mechtaniia” (1834); and Gogol’s “poema v proze” (narrative poem in prose) Mertvye dushi (1842). The friendly epistle, described as “a letter written in a friendly tone to a friend in verse,” was “one of the most popular and important Golden Age genres” (Taylor viii). While some women poets (Pavlova, Iuliia Zhadovskaia, Nadezhka Teplova, and Bakunina) wrote friendly verse epistles, it was not a genre in which they could be entirely comfortable. Taylor calls it “a
20 celebration of poets’ symposia fueled by alcoholic drink” (322). Sandler and Vowles describe it as “largely a gentleman’s genre. . . . Exchanged among men and frequently referring to amorous relationships with women, the familiar epistle imagined a specifi cally manly world of friendship and loyalty” (154). They show how Aleksei Khomiakov invoked these norms to undercut a poem by Karolina Pavlova addressed to the poet Evgenii Mil’keev (159–60). 7. On the female Bildungsroman, which refl ects women’s distinctive social experiences, see Greene, “Gender” 573–75.
8. See Goodman (317) on women’s “epistolatory autobiography”; Nancy Miller (Subject to Change 59) on the importance of reading a woman’s autobiography together with her fi ction; Schenck on the “twin discourses” of women’s poetry and autobiography (288), and on the genre of autobiography as “paradigmatic of all women’s writing” (286). On mixed genres in men’s autobiography see Spengemann (Forms of Autobiography) and Gunn (Autobiography).
9. See, for example, her “Russkaia narodnaia povest’,” and review of Kuzma Petrovich Miroshev.
10. See, for example, the following: “Groza” (“The Thunderstorm,” 1840, Maiak, ch. 4 [1840], 33), in which God warns the female-voiced narrator that she is wasting her talent on “earthly passions”; “Siialo utro obnovlen’em” (“The morning shone like a renewal,” Utrenniaia Zaria: al'manakh na 1840 god, [Dawn: literary annual for 1840], 433–37), in which a female narrator, grieving over a baby who has died, is chastised by an angel for not accepting God’s will; “Rozhdenie nezabudki” (“The Birth of the Forget-Me-Not,” 1841, Maiak, ch. 15 [1841], 29–30), a retelling of the Garden of Eden story but with an entirely innocent Adam and culpable Eve; and two excerpts from her Skazaniia v stikhakh Iulianiia Nikomidiiskogo [untitled, Moskvitianin, No. 4 (1842), 301–03, and “Otryvok iz skazaniia v stikhakh Iulianiia Nikomidiiskogo,” (Excerpt from The Legend of Julia of Nicomedia) in Sbornik v pol’zu bednykh semeistv Basmannogo otdeleniia na 1849 g., [Literary collection on behalf of poor families in the Basmannoe district of Moscow] 39–42), which describes the torture endured by the female protagonist for the glory of God.
11. See Cixous, “Sorties.” On “dark” and “fair” heroines in Russian Romantic literature, see Zhirmunskii 305–07; Davidovich 96, 113; and Boele 183–211.
12. Belinskii, for example, praised Pavlova’s work for its “manly energy” (“muzhestvennaia energiia”; “Russkie zhurnaly” 191). It was Mme de Staël who fi rst wrote (in 1800) about the woman writer as “la femme extraordinaire”—a being alienated both from men and other women—in De la littérature (341), as well as in her novel Corinne, ou l’Italie (1807). In the twentieth century Virginia Woolf polemicized with de Staël by emphasizing the relationship between the “ordinary” and “extraordinary woman as a writer” (“Women and Fiction”142).
13. Bakunina’s mother, besides writing memoirs and travel literature, acted in private performances of plays, including one of Ivan Krylov’s, with the author himself. She was also well acquainted with the playwright Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Shakhovskoi (1777–1846), who left his literary papers to her daughter, Praskov’ia. Bakunina’s father, Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakunin, was a
21 member of Beseda liubitelei russkogo slova (Society of Lovers of Russian Letters), the literary group of Gavriil Romanovich Derzhavin (1743–1816) and Admiral Aleksandr Semenovich Shishkov (1754–1851). Her brother Vasilii translated a series of vaudevilles from the French. One of her sisters, Avdot’ia, corresponded with the Polish national poet Adam Mickiewicz. Another, Ekaterina, wrote a posthumously published memoir of the Crimean War, in which she served as a nurse. (Greene, “Praskov’ia Bakunina” 45).
14. In 1842, the year of the polemic between Zrazhevskaia and Bakunina, he was living in Dresden, where he published his fi rst prorevolutionary Hegelian essay, the controversial “Die Reaktion in Deutschland” (1842), in Deutsche Jahrbücher für Wissenschaft und Kunst, the journal of the left Hegelian, Arnold Ruge (1802–1880). On Mikhail Bakunin, see Randolph.
15. In addition, Bakunina, as an inhabitant of Moscow, may have identifi ed with the longstanding cultural rivalry between Moscow and St. Petersburg, one refl ected, perhaps, by the journals, Moskvitianin and the St. Petersburg Maiak, in which their exchange took place (Marcus Levitt, personal communication, July 7, 2006).
16. On Romanticism as a pan-European, late eighteenth- to mid-nineteenth-century movement, see Wellek. Literate Russians, while constituting a small percentage of the population, nonetheless could closely follow European trends in thick journals (tolstye zhurnaly), which published translations of European belles lettres, reports from foreign capitals, and even lists of book titles published in France, England, and Germany.
17. Sandra Gilbert writes of an “inescapable link between female anatomy and literary destiny, between the perceived body of the ‘feminine’ poet and the body of her work” (299). On men’s denigrating reviews of women’s writing as a form of sexual harassment, see Spender 64–66.
18. On the reception of eighteenth-century women authors in Russia and England, see Vowles; James-Cavan 9; and Donoghue 159–74.
19. For Thomas Higginson’s advice to Dickinson that she “delay to publish”—advice that she followed—and his reiteration, as late as 1875, that her poems were “too delicate to publish,” see Thomas Johnson 113–14; and Habegger 454, 557–58; For Wordsworth’s discouragement of Jewsbury, resulting in her poem, “A Farewell to the Muse” (1825) see Clarke 60–68, esp. 67. We cannot rule out ironic overtones in Jewsbury’s poem, which, like several by women and men, describes in poetry her inability to write poetry (Greene, Reinventing 19, 108, 172). One is struck, however, by its sense of hopelessness.
20. “Romantics’ attitudes to women’s literary participation were consistently hostile” (Catriona Kelly, History 36). See also Greene, Reinventing 219 n. 3.
21. See also Ross 25–26, on the sexual identity crisis of Romantic men poets, leading to a subliminal identifi cation with “two new masculine roles . . . that become signifi cant in the early nineteenth century: the scientist and the industrial capitalist.” Catriona Kelly similarly writes: “The second-generation [Russian] Romantics . . . had to be made to appear as ‘masculine’ as the
22 heroes of the Napoleonic War or the colonizers of the Caucasus” (History 41).
22. In France: Pavla Miller 105; Perrot, 44. In England: Delinger 28–29, 32; Curran 217. In the United States: Pavla Miller 94–95, 98. See also John Adams’s letter replying to his wife Abigail, who, during the Second Continental Congress of 1776, asked him to “remember the ladies” in “the new Code of Laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make”; he jokes that the Revolution has “loosened the bands of Government everywhere,” that apprentices, students, Indians, and Negroes have “[grown] insolent” and now women, too, are discontented (Rossi 10, 11). See also Pavla Miller 94–95, 98.
23. In England, literary annuals and women’s journals, which created an enormous, if ghettoized, demand for women’s writings, elicited disparaging remarks from several men writers (Hoagwood and Ledbetter 76–79; Reynolds; Vincent 41–45, 285–92). In France between 1830 and 1848, men’s “diatribes” in the periodic press against French women poets can be attributed to similar “economic determinants” (Boutin, par. 18–19). In the United States, Hawthorne famously remarked to his publisher in a letter of 1854, "America is now wholly given over to a damned mob of scribbling women”—who were more successful in the marketplace than he. In Russia men critics disparaged Evdokiia Rostopchina—whose poetry was extremely popular in the 1830s and 1840s—for writing “too much,” while attributing her success to women readers, by implication an undereducated and undiscriminating audience (Greene, Reinventing 103).
24. On the diffi culties that women have faced in the fi eld of literary criticism in Europe and Russia, see Lanser and Beck; Lipking; Catriona Kelly, “Missing Links”; Gheith 83–36.
25. “The ultimate sources of all these [domestic conduct] books were the New Testament (especially the teaching of St. Paul)” (Hornbeak 3). Jason Whitman cites 1 Timothy 2:11 in The Young Lady’s Aid to Usefulness and Happiness (216), and a reference to St. Paul’s teachings on women’s duties appears in Charles Butler’s The American Lady (218). A vast number of European domestic conduct books advocating female docility and submission to men were translated into Russian and reviewed in the Russian periodical press during the mid nineteenth century (Greene, “Domestic Ideology” 92–93 n. 9). Pushkareva, who writes that Russian ecclesiastical literature traditionally described the ideal woman as “‘quiet, ‘humble,’ ‘silent’” (38), cites a collection of such texts published as late as 1898.
26. On the woman question and Vernadskaia, see Stites 35–37 and Rosenholm 263–324; on Tur and the woman question, see Gheith 83–128; on Tsebrikova, see Catriona Kelly, “Missing Links” 68–69; on Khvoshchinskaia, who wrote poetry under her own name but prose and literary criticism under male pseudonyms, see Gheith 52–82, 156–85, Krestovskii; and Greene, Reinventing 112–35.
27. Forrester (84, 91) points out that even Tsvetaeva—who wrote female-gendered criticism under her own name—had issues with signature, voice, and authorial authority.
28. Scott in her discussion argues that it is not in women’s best interest to treat these two paradigms as mutually exclusive; to do so is to “grant the premise that since women cannot be identical to
23 men in all respects, they cannot be equal to them” (174).
29. See, for example, Gilligan and Dworkin.
30. See Khvoshchinskaia’s similar comment on Pushkin and Byron’s “deliberate atheism (and at the same time cowardly sanctimoniousness), fi lthy sensuality, etc.” (Semevskii, Russkaia mysl’ 11 [1890]: 100).
31. In one three-volume collection of ocherki spanning the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Kostelianets and Sidorov) all the authors are men.
32. See, for example, Pushkin’s “Pikovaia dama” (Queen of Spades, 1834), Baratynsky’s “Nalozhnitsa” (The Concubine, 1831, title later changed to “Tsyganka, [The Gypsy Woman]), and Lermontov’s Geroi nashego vremeni (Hero of Our Time, 1840) (“Taman,” “Bela” “Kniazhna Mary”).
33. On the controversy surrounding Zrazhevskaia’s translation, see Fainshtein 127–34.
34. In 1790 a collection of speeches by Joshua Reynolds before the Royal Academy of Arts was published in Russian translation (Reinol’ds, Dzhoshua, Rechi govorennye kavalerom Reinoldsom v Angliiskoi korolevskoi akademii khudozhestv v Londone, RNB, General’nyi alfavitnyi catalog, 1725–1998, 26 June 2006). Hugh Blair's lecture on “The Sublime in Writing” (“O vysokom v proizvedeniiakh slovesnosti,” 1783) appeared in Russian in 1791, and again in 1823, and his discussions of the sublime in the poetry of Ossian in 1807 and 1821 (Levin 150, 164, 173, 176, 182, 185, 189). Gogol (192), for example, privileges the sublime by attributing tragedy’s superiority as a dramatic form to its ability to evoke vysokie oshchushcheniia (sublime sensations), while he depicted the beautiful (woman) as imperfect or even diabolical in “Nevskii prospekt” (1835) and “Vii” (1835).
35. I am thinking of Nabokov’s characterization of the narrator in Evgenii Onegin as a “stylized Pushkin” (Nabokov, 6).
36. “Zhenshchina—poet i avtor: Otrvyok iz romana,” Moskvitianin no. 9 (1842): 42–80. Belinskii’s sarcastic review of it appears in his “Russkaia literatura v 1842 godu.” See also Savkina (Provintsialki 59 and 72 n. 38) on Zrazhevskaia’s letter to the writer M. N. Zagoskin (1789–1852) about her last novel.
37. Savkina (“Chto znachit” 19, 29) points out that Zrazhevskaia creates a Russian women’s community in “The Menagerie” by praising and allying herself with contemporary Russian women writers.
24 Works Cited Bakunina, Praskov’ia. Stikhotvoreniia [sbornik ee stikhov, zapisano v Uiutnom]. F 16 [Bakuniny], op. 10, n.5. IRLI [Pushkinskii dom]. -----. “Otvet A. V. Zrazhevskoi: na pis’mo (Sokrashchennyi kurs knizhnoi Zoologii), napechatannoe v 1-m n. Maiaka 1842 g.” Moskvitianin 1, no. 3 (1842): 15–17. Balde, Jean, ed. Introduction to Mme de Girardin: Textes choisis et commentés. Paris: Plon, 1913. Balzac, Honoré. Sozertsatel’naia zhizn’ Ludviga Lamberta. Translated from French by Aleksandra Zrazhevskaia. St. Petersburg: Imperatorskaia Rossiiskaia Akademiia, 1835. Battersby, Christine. Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics. London: Women’s Press Limited, 1989. Belinskii, Vissarion. “Russkaia literatura v 1842 godu.” In Polnoe sobranie sochinenii. Vol. 6. Moscow: Izd. Akademii Nauk SSSR, 1955. ———. “Russkie zhurnaly.” In Polnoe sobranie sochinenii. Vol. 3. Moscow: Izd. Akademii Nauk SSSR, 1953. ———. “Zhertva. Literaturnyi eskiz. Sochinenie g-zhi Monborn [Montborne].” In Polnoe sobranie sochinenii. Vol. 1. Moscow : Izd. Akademii Nauk SSSR, 1953. Berger, Peter L., and Thomas Luckmann. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1966. Boele, Otto. The North in Russian Romantic Literature. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996. Boutin, Aimée. “Inventing the ‘Poétesse’: New Approaches to French Women Romantic Poets.” Romanticism on the Net, the Transatlantic Poetess Issues 29–30 (February–May 2003).
25 DeJean, Joan. “Staël’s Corinne: The Novel’s Other Dilemma.” In The Novel’s Seductions: Staël’s Corinne in Critical Inquiry, edited by Karyna Szmurlo. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1999. Delinger, Elizabeth Campbell. Before Victoria: Extraordinary Women of the British Romantic Era. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. Dement’ev, A. G., A. V. Zapodova, M. S. Cherepakhova, eds. Russkaia periodicheskaia pechat’, 1702–1894. Moscow: Politicheskaia literature, 1959. Donoghue, Frank. The Fame Machine: Book Reviewing and Eighteenth-Century Literary Careers. Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press, 1996. Dworkin, Andrea. Woman Hating. New York: Dutton, 1974. Eagleton, Mary, ed. Introduction to Feminist Literary Criticism. Longman: New York, 1991. Ezell, Margaret. Writing Women’s Literary History. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. Fainshtein, M. Sh. Pisatel’nitsy pushkinskoi pory: istoriko-literaturnye ocherki. Leningrad: Nauka, 1989. Fanger, Donald. Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism: A Study of Dostoevsky in Relation to Balzac, Dickens, and Gogol. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965. Forrester, Sibelan. “Tsvetaeva as Literary Critic and Critic of Critics.” In Russian Writers on Russian Writers, edited by Faith Wigzell. Oxford: Berg, 1994. Gallagher, Catherine. “George Eliot and Daniel Deronda: The Prostitute and the Jewish Question.” In Sex, Politics and Science in the Nineteenth Century Novel, edited by Ruth Yeazell. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986. Gaskell, Elizabeth. The Life of Charlotte Brontë. Rutland, Vt.: Dent, 1997. Gheith, Jehanne. Finding the Middle Ground: Krestovskii, Tur, and the Power of Ambivalence in Nineteenth-Century Russian Women’s Prose. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2004. Gilbert, Sandra. “Female Female Impersonator: Millay and the Theatre of Personality.” In Critical Essays on Edna St. Vincent Millay, edited by William Thesing. New York: G.K. Hall, 1993. Gilligan, Carol. In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982. Gogol, N. V. “Peterburgskie zapiski 1836 goda.” In Sobranie sochinenii v semi tomakh. Vol. 6. Moscow: Izd. Khudozhestvennaia literature, 1966. Goodman, Katherine. “Elisabeth to Meta: Epistolary Autobiography and the Postulation of Self.” In Life/Lines: Theorizing Women’s Autobiography, edited by Bella Brodzki and Celeste Schenck. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988. Greenberg, Wendy. Uncanonical Women: Feminine Voice in French Poetry. Atlanta, Ga.: Rodopi, 1999. Greene, Diana. “Domestic Ideology in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Russia.” In Women in Russian
26 Culture, edited by Rosalind Marsh. Oxford: Berghahn, 1998. ———. “Gender and Genre in Pavlova’s A Double Life.” Slavic Review 54, no. 3 (Fall 1995): 563–77. ———. “Praskov’ia Bakunina and the Poetess’s Dilemma.” In Russkie pisatel’nitsy i literaturnyi protsess v kontse XVIII–pervoi treti XX vv., edited by M. Sh. Fainshtein. Wilhelmshorst, Germany: F. K. Göpfert, 1995. ———. Reinventing Romantic Poetry: Russian Women Poets of the Mid-Nineteenth Century. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004. Grossman, Leonid. Balzac and Dostoevsky. Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1973. Gunn, Janet. Autobiography: Towards a Poetics of Experience. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982. Habegger, Alfred. My Wars are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson. New York: Random House, 2001. Heldt, Barbara. Terrible Perfection: Women and Russian Literature. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. Herrmann, Lesley. “George Sand and the Nineteenth-Century Russian Novel: The Quest for a Heroine.” Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1979. Hoagwood, Terence, and Kathryn Ledbetter. “Colour’d Shadows”: Contexts in Publishing, Printing, and Reading Nineteenth-Century British Women Writers. New York: Palgrave, 2005. Hornbeak, Katherine. “Richardson’s Familiar Letters and the Domestic Conduct Books.” Smith College Studies in Modern Languages 19, no. 2 (Jan. 1938): 1–29. James-Cavan, Kathleen. Introduction to Sense and Sensibility, by Jane Austen. Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 2001. Johnson, Barbara. “Gender and Poetry: Charles Baudelaire and Marceline Desbordes-Valmore.” In Displacements: Women, Tradition, Literatures in French, edited by Joan DeJean and Nancy K. Miller. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991. Johnson, Thomas H. Emily Dickinson: An Interpretive Biography. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1955. Kaplan, Cora. Sea Changes: Essay on Culture and Feminism. London: Verso, 1986. Kelly, Catriona. A History of Russian Women’s Writing, 1820–1992. New York: Clarendon Press, 1994. ———. “Missing Links: Russian Women Writers as Critics of Women Writers.” In Russian Writers on Russian Writers, edited by Faith Wigzell. Oxford: Berg, 1994. Kelly, Gary. “Feminine Romanticism, Masculine History, and the Founding of the Modern Liberal State. Essays and Studies 51 (1998): 1–18. Kornilov, A. A. Molodye gody Mikhaila Bakunina. Moscow: Izd. M. S. Sabashnikova, 1915. Kostelianets, B. O., and Sidorov, P. A., eds. Russkie ocherki. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia Literatura, 1956. 27 Krestovskii, V. “Ia zhivu ot pochty do pochty—”: iz perepiski Nadezhdy Dmitrievny Khvoshchinskoi. Edited by Arja Rosenholm and Hilde Hoogenboom. Fichtenwalde, Germany: F. K. Göpfert, 2001. “Kritika i bibliografi ia,” Moskvitianin no. 9 (1851). Kuleshov, V. I. Natural’naia shkola v russkoi literature XIX veka. Moscow: Prosveshchenie, 1982. Laing, R. D. The Politics of Experience. New York: Pantheon Books, 1967. Lanser, Susan Sniader, and Evelyn Torton Beck. “[Why] Are There No Great Women Critics?: And What Difference Does it Make?” In The Prism of Sex: Essays in the Sociology of Knowledge, edited by Julia A. Sherman and Evelyn Torton Beck. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979. Ledkovsky, Marina, Charlotte Rosenthal, Mary Zirin, eds. Dictionary of Russian Women Writers. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. Levin, Iu. D. Ossian v russkoi literature: konets XVIII–pervaia tret’ XIX veka. Leningrad: Nauka, 1980. Lipking, Laurence. “Aristotle’s Sister: A Poetics of Abandonment.” Critical Inquiry 10:no.1 (Sept. 1983): 61–81. Lootens, Tricia. Lost Saints: Silence, Gender, and Victorian Literary Canonization. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996. Mellor, Anne. “A Criticism of Their Own: Romantic Women Literary Critics.” In Questioning Romanticism, edited by John Beer. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. ———. Romanticism and Gender. New York, N.Y.: Routledge, 1993. Miller, Nancy. Subject to Change: Reading Feminist Writing. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. Miller, Pavla. Transformations of Patriarchy in the West, 1500–1900. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998. Mironenko, S. V. Dekabristy: Biografi cheskii spravochik. Moscow: Nauka, 1988. Mirsky, D. S. A History of Russian Literature. Edited by Francis J. Whitfi eld. New York: Knopf, 1964. Myers, Sylvia. The Bluestocking Circle: Women, Friendship, and the Life of the Mind in Eighteenth-Century England. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Nabokov, Vladimir, trans. Introduction to Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse, by Aleksandr Pushkin. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964. Nikolaev, P. A., ed. Russkie pisateli, 1800–1917: biografi cheskii slovar’. 4 vols. Moscow: Sovetskaia entsiklopediia, 1989. Oxford English Dictionary Online. 2d ed.
30 Soch. O. P. Shishkinoi.” Maiak t. 1, kn. 2 (1842): 143–220. ———. “Zhenshchina—poet i avtor: otrvyok iz romana” Moskvitianin, no. 9 (1842), 42–80. ———. “Zverinets.” Maiak, t. 1 kn.1 (1842): 1–18.
31 “The Menagerie”1
by Aleksandra Vasil’evna Zrazhevskaia
and
“Answer to A. V. Zrazhevskaia’s Letter (A Short Course in Literary Zoology) Published in Maiak, no. 1, 1842”
by Praskov’ia Bakunina
32 First Letter (To Varvara Ivanovna Bakunina)2 So many years have passed since our separation left me orphaned—you were completely lost from my sight but not from my heart. Each time the family would get together and start talking we would always recall sweet Maman, her kindness and care. Just your presence used to make me happy. After a long search, I’ve fi nally found you, and I hasten to give you a short sketch of my life. You are so kind that at the very least it won’t bore you to read through these ravings: before me are eight books I’ve published; respectful journals have given them good notices but what they really think, I don’t know.3 You sowed the fi rst seeds, which have now come up, and I have resolved to present the still unripened fruit to your discerning taste. Disregard my mistakes with the same maternal sympathy that I haven’t forgotten to this day and will never forget. I remember with delight the blessed time of my childhood. It glimmers before me indistinctly: walks, the Stock Exchange building, birds, fl owers, and your caresses. All this I keep in my memory. However, I barely remember your visits or you yourself—despite how sweet it is for me to think of those bygone days. But in my memory there still survives one Madonna, which came to life under your brush. All the other details have been erased; I only remember your glance, the palette in your hands—and then the beautiful divine little face that by your will was born on the canvas. There is more—tremendous rooms, curtains with black and gold eagles—I remember nothing else. So many years! So many changes! You were completely lost from my sight. I had been looking for a way to write to you for a long time but I couldn’t—I didn’t know how to get in touch with you. But fortunately, the Russian Academy published [my translation of Balzac’s] Louis Lambert. I became acquainted with the president, A. S. Shishkov;4 I had a presentiment that I could probably fi nd you through him. I immediately obeyed this good counsel—and found out your address from him. I will begin with the past and I will tell you about it in a few words. Fate threw me off the usual rails. I stepped over them and found myself, I don’t know how and where. . . .5 I created another fate for myself, brought other cares upon myself: my disturbing passion to use up paper has remained with me ever since childhood. Even as a child I translated a volume of Madam Guyon’s works, A Short and Easy Way to Prayer (Moyen court et très facile pour prier Dieu).6 At the age of eleven I had already written novels and fantastic voyages. They 33 scolded me, laughed at me, tore up my works, and burned them—but they didn’t reform me: that passion became my nature. In 1828, the last year of Empress Maria Fedorovna’s life,7 the idea came to me to write a novel in secret and to dedicate it to her. I made the decision, carried it out, and sent off those rever- ies (of course in secret from my family, who, had they known, would not have allowed me to do it), by post to Tsarskoe Selo,8 into the very hands of the late empress of blessed memory. The Imperial Patroness of Enlightenment accepted my fi rst childish attempt with the angelic sympathy so characteristic of her. She favored me with fl attering attention—I received a royal gift and I triumphantly revealed my secret undertaking to my entire family. It made my father happy for a while; from that time they no longer forbade me to scribble. I have used up so much, so much paper in my life, more sheets than I can count. The secret novel that I wrote in two weeks at night and dedicated to the empress is unpublished. I guard it as my treasure—a monument to my daring, for which I would not now have the strength. At the empress’s request, this same manuscript was examined by our great poet V. A. Zhukovsky.9 In connection with this, I wrote to him and explained without reservation that I absolutely wanted to write exactly like Mme de Staël, my favorite writer. A mere trifl e! And it never occurred to me that I lacked her learning, means, time—that’s all! Who isn’t assured of her own gifts? V. A. Zhu- kovsky answered me that authorship removes women from their quiet sphere, that all women-writers constitute exceptions and pay very dearly for their glittering fame; that this is something that would infl uence my entire life; that thousands of unpleasantnesses are connected with authorship and that I must study language, and gather information and my own observations of nature and society; only then is it possible to know what to write about and how to write; and all this demands a great deal of work. Thus ended the letter of our dear national poet V. A. Zhukovsky. Do you believe that this did not frighten your goddaughter in the least, and did not change her mind? Having at that time no means or money, I very dispassionately set aside the idea of getting published and ardently set about my new work. I studied night and day with blinders on and rashly rushed forward, fearing neither stones nor chasms. Sometimes collisions stopped me in full fl ight and I became thoughtful, but I never lost heart. Here, somehow unexpectedly, I became acquainted with a lady, an amateur of the beautiful in literature. This was Madame V—née Princess Kh—va. Having
34 become acquainted, we competed in covering paper with our scribbles. She didn’t spare me. She criticized and laughed, covered the margins of my fi rst notebooks with her comments, and what do you think? She didn’t kill my love of literature; on the contrary, this excited me even more: in 1833 I published my “Letters.”10 Lovers of reading saw in them “an album,” “divination,” “a journal,” “a manu- script” and “fate.” Then I translated Le Lorgnon—The Lorgnette, by Mme Emile de Girardin.11 Then The Contemplative Life of Louis Lambert by Balzac, which I sprinkled with my annotations like some archeologist, and from which I left out a great deal:12 Balzac is always provident; you can always fi nd passages to omit in him. But that novel, woven out of philosophy, I polished with love for an entire year—to this day it pleases me! There is a great deal of mastery in it, beautiful pages and genuine feeling. Any day now I expect two more manuscripts from the Censorship:13 Ma- demoiselle de Marsan by Charles Nodier,14 a novel based on historical events, and Novellas by various writers. I must confess: it’s hard to be a good translator but it’s even harder to be a good writer. By a writer I mean one who can endure her own glory. And besides that there are so many, many demands! Even a true genius fl own down from heaven could hardly please the crowd. As soon as a work sees the light of day, a den of terrible wild beasts await it and like it or not you hand it over to them to be torn to pieces. What a festive occasion! Here their fun begins . . . they talk it over in their fashion . . . they mutilate it, they trample it underfoot . . . What then of the maternal heart; how can one not stand up for one’s child? And my child-loving heart suffers even more for a foster child. One misfortune ends and look—a new one looms! When everyone has seen and judged your work then there will be no end to the questions: “Why wasn’t this put in and that left out?” “This is unclear.” “That is impossible.” “Why is this not that way?” “And that, not this way?” And unfortunately to all these innumerable questions one can only answer: It must be this way . . . Because I so wished it. Here you are, Maman, this is a light sketch, after all: but if you fully un- derstood how painful and tormenting it is to endure caustic remarks and cold injustice, you would be horrifi ed. I am not writing you my opinion but my lived experience. How much better is blessed ignorance—it’s a real paradise! Expe- rience has a scowling face and an unattractive appearance. Zhukovsky’s words 35 in part were justifi ed . . . and I, understanding my defi ciencies, occupy myself diligently, study, write, and seek to sustain my literary reputation. Oh! How I would like to see you! This sweet thought entices me and carries me far from the sphere in which I live. With childlike devotion I await your reply. Aleksandra Zrazhevskaia S. Petersburg Chernaia Rechka June 28, 1836
36 Second Letter (To P. M. Bakunina)15 A Short Course in Literary Zoology My dearest friend, You are in debt to me—I am waiting for a verse epistle from you; you promised to dedicate a few pages to me. I read your “Thunderstorm” in Maiak and I liked the poem.16 Its direction is true and straight, its goal pure and radi- ant, its idea sublime. And all this specifi cally because it is religious. You were born for this poetry: with your gentle verse you captivate, with your warm heart you heat, and with radiant truth you send a ray, if only one, into the cold crowd, numbed by the frozen crystallization of Romanticism.17 Up to now, except for Princess Zinaida Volkonskaia,18 A. P. Glinka,19 and Countess Rostopchina,20 our women poets haven’t concerned themselves with true poetry but have followed a hackneyed, trite path and mimicked men. But in fact, my friend, why shouldn’t those among us who possess the art of telling a good story not devote ourselves more assiduously to our writings? Write us a tale, a play, a novel of the human heart, and let there be some kindness, sweetness, tenderness, gentleness, affection, some divinity in it. You won’t get far with only passions and terrifying events. But in some—look, they so glad- den the heart—there is so much mastery and giftedness that indeed they have enough for more than one such novel. Only let them not begrudge observation, wit, playfulness and most importantly, warmth and soul: let them compose more eternal verities and well-aimed blows at the delusions of society. Why should they fear society? They have enough strength and courage to fi ght it! Let all this be put into the frame of a novel; in short, carry it out masterfully; oh, then they will captivate the crowd without fail and there will be women Goethes, Schil- lers, Shakespeares, Tassos, Klopstocks,21 Miltons, Dantes, etc., etc. Only, for the sake of your future success, be original in your creations. Don’t slavishly imitate anyone, and don’t write fantastic tales. God preserve you from fantastic novels! Don’t write them with the same old dreaminess: the fashion for “in dreams, what used to be, the past” is gone. Don’t even imitate Hoffmann himself or Jean-Paul Richter.22 Fantastic, alchemical works can succeed only once, and only for dreamers of genius. You ask what I have done and what I am doing. Recently I have been devot- ing myself to children’s literature and have published a translation of J. Mirval’s The Hermit of Chimboraco, or, The Young Colombian Travelers.23 I liked this 37 account so much that I sat up whole nights translating it, not begrudging the labor and time; I traveled by map in the footsteps of the two emigrants, who, like Telemachus,24 were searching for their father all over America. They travel through all the most important places, states, cities, rivers, lakes, each of them marked by incidents that recall to the reader everything that is marvelous in this part of the world. I also have translated Prandi’s article, from the Revue britannique, “An Outline of New Italian Literature”; N. A. Polevoi printed my translation in his journal Syn otechestva (Son of the Fatherland).25 I have published The Children’s Library in Four Parts: Tales by Miss Trémadeure.26 The Paris Academy awarded the author a prize for it but I have the entire print run, unsold. N. V. Kukol’nik published one of these tales in Khudozhestvennaia gazeta [Newspaper of the Arts]. When I experience such failure in even my small ventures, it’s frighten- ing to undertake big ones. You incur losses. . . . Loss, profi t, and—poetry! . . . How incongruous! But of course that’s the way it is—such is our age. At present I am contributing to Maiak and despite this, I have had little success; my books aren’t sold out. Why? I don’t know. I can only console myself that I am not alone. Almost everyone has the honor of being in the same situation! And when it’s everyone—then “Two in distress make sorrow less.” The gift of being able to compose verse or write prose is wonderful in its way; but regardless of any such accomplishment, one’s primary success always depends upon having a public voice, and that voice often depends upon the criticism of journalists and the zeal of booksellers. And so to survive, for a poet, prose writer, or any person with talent, here is what is essential: the attention of the public to one’s works, its patronage, and most importantly, the public’s recognition of their value, that is, in the usual sense—fi nancial support—a little enthusiasm, even more patience, and a great deal of work. And without this and all of this I am convinced that it is better to stay home. But to stay home would be a complete disaster. It costs a great deal to publish at one’s own expense—it’s impossible to reprint books without spending money: but one can’t stop publish- ing—or all one’s previous labors will be lost. It’s already too late to reestablish myself—I have gone too far to turn back. There you have the bitter and thorny frame that surrounds my sweet literary life. Question: how to proceed when there are no means? You grow weary despite yourself; or you have to be a perfect bogatyr27 morally.
38 Surely this isn’t your fate? But you are in heaven. You delight everyone with your poetic talent, you pluck laurel wreaths of praise from your innumerable friends and admirers, including mine as well. You are in bliss—or at least you don’t have reason to complain about the battle of heavenly poetry with terrestrial materiality, while I . . . This correspondence is very relevant to my current mode of life. Just be strong, my friend, and don’t give up, and I will do the same. Friendship is a wonderful feeling! I had lovely friends—lovely like you, in the full sense of the word, clever, sensitive, with pure, gentle, subtle taste. I felt like I was in heaven. And suddenly, from out of the blue, evil circumstances overturned everything. They fl ung all my friends to the ends of the earth; they routed me like Napoleon at the Berezina River.28 They threw poor me out of the enchanted circle. At fi rst intoxicated, in ecstasy, I was oblivious—but I soon noticed that I had been tossed unwillingly, but also by my own volition, onto a pathless steppe, into some kind of backwater. What was there for me to do? You guessed it. I immediately clambered and crawled in and began to live a new life on earth, in a farmstead right next to your dear estate. . . . I ask people to love and pity me—but here’s my misfortune. My beloved ideals don’t fi t the measure of ordinary people, that is, people with mathematical, chemical, and mechanical intellects. That’s why I do everything wrong, everything inside out, and I seem strange and unusual. For example, these people consider the attraction to writing, to publishing and ex- pressing one’s thoughts aloud as some hideous delusion of a puffed up individual of evil inclinations, a very indecent soul in a female wrapper. They don’t believe my heartfelt zeal; they don’t believe my heart, they are deaf to my prayers, they are suspicious of my actions; well, in short, they are prepared at my smallest failure to smash to smithereens my golden idol, that ardent, living beauty, fi lled with delight, which is love for the speech of the heart and feelings, fl aring up at the fi rst echo of everything sweet and sympathetic to the heart. Judge for yourself what the situation is when from my heavenly refuge where I live so joyously, where it is so easy to breathe, dreary materiality carries me into that long, wild wilderness, overgrown with the prickly plants of accounts, trading, and re-selling, where I am so alien. Where there are countless numbers of literary insects and beasts, large and small, all of predatory species, and all of them hungry. Whatever one of them comes across he drags off for himself: a fl uff of glory, a bone of power, a small handful of the dirt that they call money.
39 Scarcely has one succeeded when the entire crowd throws itself on him, tears at him, screams, gnashes its teeth—well, it’s just a horror! Imagine me having fl own down from my heavenly refuge with childlike inexperience fi nding myself in this menagerie! I think, “How sweet they are, how pretty, and how endearing.” I approach one: “Grrrrrrr!” . . . I approach another: ”Grrrrrrr!” . . . I approach a third: “Grrrrrrrr!” . . . And the teeth, the teeth—what a horror! There’s nowhere to run from them! Wait, I will describe for you several examples from this me- nagerie. Amazing beasts—they know how to talk! One of them—oh, what a strange one! Motley fur like a fl owery prose style, and sharp as mockery—advises me not to write, assuring me that any woman who takes up this occupation will be subject to everyone’s bad opinion and criticism. “What can a young woman write? What passions will she talk about? Everyone will point a fi nger at her and say, ‘It’s obvious that she has experienced this, and didn’t just make it up.’ So speaks this terrible beast. In vain I answer him: “You’re perfectly free to base your entire aesthetic on passion alone; passions are far from constituting the beautiful. On the contrary, it’s passions that are the dirty side of humanity; but in us there is also the pure. Look at God’s world and at humanity, how much of the beautiful it contains—and without passions! They say that there are vicious passions and innocent pas- sions. Innocent passions are a spark broken down into its spiritual element and incombustible: they only warm and give life. Vicious passions are the same spark thrown onto combustible fi rewood: they devour everything. What if it is impossible to live without passions? There still remains for me the large share of innocent human passions about which, as a sinful and weak person, even I can speak without blushing; because I can experience them in myself, observe them in those around me, and worst of all, read my fi ll of your unfortunate stories in which you, imagining yourselves the only masters and inhabitants of the earth, so insatiably and with such pleasure, with such love, with such bragging about your detailed knowledge, depict only the passionate, the passionate, and the pas- sionate—both in prose and in verse—so that whether resolutely to renounce your books or to yield to the irresistible call to study, to learn, to read—read whatever is there, like a voyage to the North Pole, to a country of bears where I never have been and however animatedly depicted, all the same—I do not know what to do. You sovereigns of knowledge, wisdom, strength, and reason fi nd pleasure in describing only the passionate, the passionate, and the bestial, and you offer us
40 this descent into nothingness as the height of the beautiful and don’t even guess that true life itself remains untouched; and that a sensitive woman, dedicated and loving—boldly and legitimately can seize the entire trophy of the beautiful and remind you about it from time to time. “If only you could understand, Messieurs Little Beasts, how unforgivably you all, all without exception, act toward us, the friends and companions of your earthly existence, you would be horrifi ed! You would not demand from women writers your materialistic expertise! And yet you, so learned, so all-knowing, so thoughtlessly pose the question, ‘What can a young woman write? What pas- sions will she talk about?’ Why don’t you ask instead: What do young women now have to read? “Enjoy your passions; and let women delight people by painting the beau- tiful and by returning to the humiliated, defi led word its beauty, purity, and holiness.” Thus I spoke to him. I spoke longer and more strongly than this, and what do you think? Was I convincing? . . . As a result of my improvisation there ap- peared a monstrous tale, a completely hideous satire, a mixture of sophisms and bile, “The Woman Writer,”29 in which some talentless woman, an exception of exceptions, an extreme of extremes, exaggerated to monstrosity, is exhibited as the model and representative of all women who write. Another similar wild beast is of the Ferocious species. Gazing penetratingly and grimly, like a polemic in a journal, he wanted to grill me with the question: “Why have there been no women Newtons, Cuviers,30 Leibnitzes, Humes, Pas- cals, Descartes, Goethes, Tassos, and other such geniuses?” “For the sole and suffi cient reason,” I answer him, “that you” (but I just gave you my views about this) 31 “don’t prepare us to be Newtons or Descartes. Look: our eyes are sharper, our hearing keener, our touch more delicate; our perceptions are altogether superior to men’s. Our nerves are more sensitive and our muscles are no weaker than men’s—look at the peasant woman: she ploughs and threshes and chops wood—she performs all of men’s work. Give a woman school, subject her from childhood to work, work, work, found women’s uni- versities and academic chairs, and then you will see whether a woman succeeds in having a strong and subtle intellect, thoroughness, genius, inventiveness, and endurance. But no, no! I don’t even necessarily insist that women be given a university, a chair, study Latin, Greek, Hebrew, geometry, trigonometry, forti-
41 fi cations, navigation, etc., etc.—then they would really lose everything that is beautifully feminine and be intolerable men in female form. Humanity has quite enough men wearing doctoral mortar boards! I speak this way only to refute our persecutors, so that they confess that their question is mean-spirited, perceive that it is women’s upbringing, not their nature, that makes it impossible for them to become Newtons, Descartes, Pascales, and Humes, and don’t reproach them for it. “Wasn’t it you,” I said, “who assured us that we were only beautiful and lovable when we were empty-headed mannequins, chatterboxes, or mischie- vous imps; that we shouldn’t worry our heads about anything except bouquets, frontlets,32 bracelets, earrings, and contredances: that everything else is men’s business? If any woman takes up work in the public sphere, then she’s entirely self-taught, snatching a few moments of leisure and devoting it to a beloved occupation. But is it really possible for someone who is self-educated to be- come accomplished in the sciences and in philosophy? That demands system- atic training from childhood, but our instruction is limited to French, English, schoolmasters, music, dance masters, and the ability to understand light reading! This is why self-educated women writers, yielding to the attraction of feelings, favor the present century, and are not in the least concerned about their reputa- tion in the eyes of posterity; and most of all they avoid men’s ridicule, and at its fi rst outburst not only don’t they develop, but on the contrary, they smother and annihilate, at its very source in themselves, that tenacious observation and reason from which great truths of genius are born; although there was a time” (I noted to my sharp-toothed bear) “when Descartes himself paid tribute to the philosophical minds of two crowned women writers.33 Moreover, I repeat, such a disposition is opposed from childhood itself by women’s upbringing and by the grim fate of persecution that befalls so many fi ne women. For example, Mme de Staël and our Russian Bunina,34 yes, and many others were punished for their minds, knowledge, gifts, and unusual élan. Here is the key to the lack of women Cuviers, Leibnitzes, Goethes, Schillers, Humes, etc. Debilitated by fate, ridicule, and censure, they only lack the fi rmness of spirit and the tiny bit of ambition necessary to stand their ground to the end in this battle against nature, people, and circumstances. But give a woman everything that you give a man in his upbringing, and then, of course, as many giants would appear among women writers . . . Women giants . . . Oh, what a horror!”
42 “But that’s because, but that’s because, Madame,” he interrupted me in the heat of my enthusiasm, “you are their partisan, and you don’t admit that even poor books by women can be praised to the skies. Women are astonishingly expert at extolling themselves and collecting subscribers,”35 he added with a sarcastic grin. “If you don’t like the book, don’t read it. But the money is already in the bank.” A real man of this century! Even if you put him in heaven he would start talking about subscribers and money. “Believe me,” I answered him, “women writers solicit subscribers not to make a profi t but only for the means to publish their works. Their fi ne feeling and self-sacrifi cing dedication to the beautiful is too lofty and places them far from men’s profi teering. I doubt that one of our woman writers has bought herself even a bracelet, much less a dacha, from her literary earnings. They are happy if by your kindness they succeed in offsetting their losses.” Having said these words I would have liked to escape from this enraged beast, this terrible enthusiast of hair splitting and examination giving, when sud- denly he stopped me with his thundering voice. “Stop! Stop! Madam, we haven’t fi nished yet. I need to talk with you. What do you understand the word ‘authorship’ to mean?” “Thinking, feeling, and power,” I answered him, “the inner, living capacity to embody visible and invisible objects in words: our sensations, feelings and external impressions, virtues, vices, mistakes, peculiarities—and by entertain- ing the mind, and captivating the heart, imperceptibly to impress on mind and heart the truths necessary for our well-being—eternal verities of self-knowledge without which we won’t even be able to listen to those truths. And men and women are equally endowed with this capacity. “Every book is the realized thinking, feeling, and power of the writer; if it gives me pleasure and benefi t, then it certainly also gives light, warms, and gives my soul strength, communicating some kind of truth, which, with its novelty, captivates and vivifi es. And I am prepared to show you hundreds of books by the female sex that pass this test. As a Russian woman I cannot fail to rejoice in A. P. Glinka’s beautiful account of the Life of the Most Holy Virgin Mother of God; and thanks to her we now have a delightful picture of the life of the Eternal Virgin.36 It is impossible not to admire the excellent, gifted author of Skopin-Shuiskii;37 who doesn’t wonder at the learned works of the young Elisa-
43 veta Kul’man?38 It is impossible to forget the superb tales of Zeniada R—va;39 Evenings at Karpovka by Zhukova;40 Notes of a Cavalry Maid by Durova;41 Russian History for Children by Ishimova;42 fi nally the tender, clever, lively, experienced pen of Fedor Van Dim,43 such a traitorously revealing women’s pen, adorning Russkii Vestnik (The Russian Messenger), Maiak (The Lighthouse), and Russkaia beseda (Russian Conversation) with her works, almost outweigh- ing the preeminence of experienced men writers, but already ceding nothing to them. And the wonderful talent of Doloroza,44 like a diamond, brilliant with all the rainbows of life . . . and the splendid works of K. Pavlova45 in Moskvitianin. Yes, and you, my friend,46 blush as much as you like, but you stand there, too. There’s no telling how many of our women’s talents are still hidden under the modest cover of a pseudonym . . . The writer of the witty novel The Husband- Egoist under the name of Mr. Unbeliever, who publishes wonderful tales in Otechestvennye zapiski. The writers of mystical capital letters A—, B—, T—, R—, P—, K— and others, who all are poetically fi rst rate. There are no weak spots in the truth, whoever tells it—man or woman. “In the wildest wilderness of the blessed Russian word, where from time to time one meets so many brilliant women of talent, I could name in addition the author of the historical novel Ol’ga,47 an author-aristocrat who commands the rare gift of setting forth history in its bright legends with absorbing fascination . . . A woman aristocrat and for all that a Russian woman! . . . I feel as if I myself have been adorned with the wreath of European glory.” “I congratulate you, Madam,” interrupted my implacable antagonist. “Your lot is more enviable than Tasso’s.”48 And to madden this desperate hater of women writers even more, I added: “I don’t know what the subtle woman’s mind can’t manage to do—there are no depths it cannot penetrate. Women catch on the wing those lofty truths over which men-philosophers labor so fruitlessly. But note: for women everywhere there are more dangers; she pays more dearly for everything. It was to them that it was said: ‘I will greatly multiply your sorrows and your lamentations.’49 If we merely entertain with our books, there is no reason for you to be angry; no philanthrope will open our pages: they will die before their author. “If women fi nd time for dances, visits, empty chatter, card games, and other ways of wasting time, and if this is not regarded as a breach of their responsibili- ties as daughters, wives, housekeepers, and mothers, then how can you regard it
44 as a crime that instead of idly killing time in vain dissipations, they spend it in the useful, peaceful, pleasant pursuits of a writer, so natural to a person?” The third beast has striped brown fur; no vivid color ever brightened this gloomy beast! He is a four-footed calculation—coldness positively emanates from him—his eyes are like glass and the light of indignant sarcasm seems to blaze from them with each outburst by women writers. Delight has never imprinted itself upon his soul or beguiled him; in the mind of this beast, as in a labyrinth, you’ll fi nd neither beginning nor end, just turnings. He completed my hopelessness by unceremoniously declaring that there is still another way to suppress “implacable women writers”: shelve their works; their talent will crumble to dust and it will disappear without a trace. . . . “No surprise here!” I exclaimed. “There’s no assistance, no encouragement, no means with which to publish; you perforce break your pen in two and tear up your writing. Because until you are able to make your way in the world, as they say, until you can draw the public’s attention to yourself, until then there is no possibility of fi ghting your way through this rabble to God’s light.” The striped beast bowed to me—and would have liked to escape in si- lence—when I again challenged him to speak by complaining about my literary misfortunes. I made rude remarks and in horrible ravings even digressed from my topic—I launched into all striped beasts—forgive me, my friend, for a feminine deed—I was taught to get carried away. “Why are you angry? Calm yourself, Madam!” he interrupted. “Whose fault is it if you took it into your head to be an author and to imitate us? . . . Endure your just punishment.” “Oh, if it’s come to justice,” I interrupted him, “then I will make you the judge and let you decide. Well, what can we do when everything is taken from us? They took away university and academic chairs—they took away freedom—fa- thers, husbands, brothers, and sons took everything away from us . . . fi ne! I’m satisfi ed: so be it. They allotted us a special destiny: the boudoir, the dressing room, the drawing room, they assigned to us the upbringing of children, and family life—agreed—I don’t rebel: but why with all this did they not also take away from us the masculine lot of vanity? You won’t leap into history in one bound from the boudoir, the dressing room, and the drawing room. Father, hus- band, brother, son, don’t tempt me with your own example. If they didn’t strive before my eyes from morning to evening for a little place in history, I would be
45 a peaceful, and most happy creature! But when they provided me with a boudoir, gave me a dressing room, set up a drawing room, presented us with prisoners and subjects, held out power, distinction, glory, and by their own example and instruction awoke in me the taste for the wreath of history—and at the very same time granted us only a pension, just a doll, a toy; the superfi cial and trifl ing in life, in thought, and in word—they are pitiless! Why are you surprised that we armed ourselves with authorship in the boudoir, and the dressing room, and the drawing room? You yourselves took all other weapons away from us, but your tastes and strivings inspired us—how can we win?” The striped beast, having listened to my speech, shook his brown mane, muttered some kind of savage farewell, and lowered his eyes, and I translated his inexorable gaze in this way—that if the occasion arose, he would take the opportunity to frighten me thoroughly for my brave attempt to convince him of feminine merit. However, my friend, don’t despair! There are also good and useful beasts. Especially noteworthy in this menagerie are beasts of three genuses: pedantus, argumentatus, and phrase-mongerus—if you look, almost the entire menagerie is made up of them. You must be able to recognize them—what if you encounter them? You don’t want to mistakenly call them to you and pet them: they shed terribly—their fur will immediately get all over you. Pedantus is an extremely haughty beast! He greatly resembles a turkey- cock. But he’s extremely cunning; he hides his haughtiness under an amiable exterior. He gazes so pompously and always thinks about himself, believing that no one else in the whole menagerie is worthy of sunlight. He raises a cry that drowns out all the nightingales—it hurts your ears—it’s intolerable! But he is distinguishable from his prototype, the turkey-cock, in that he constantly stays in his burrow. Day and night he sees nothing and he can’t fl y. In his burrow he collects all kinds of trash from anywhere and everywhere, which in the menagerie is called “knowledge.” I already told you that these beasts speak with human sounds, although, of course, without any human sense. And the most distinctive characteristic of this beast is its pedantry: he talks only about his trash, yet he will sell it by weight for gold. He cares nothing about other people’s concerns. He won’t give up an inch of his land; his entire burrow is a yard long and when he sits himself down at the bottom of it, it constitutes his horizon.
46 This tiny horizon, on which just a small patch of sky is visible, seems to him like the world’s true horizon: for him everything is nonsense that isn’t within his little horizon; he doesn’t want to listen or know or talk about such things. In this menagerie there are famous beasts of pedantry. They madly boast and plume themselves on their glory and merits. They proudly make the rounds of fashionable burrows and don’t even respond to the greetings of the indigent beasts. One for example, extols this or that speck of dust from his rubbish and is willing to spend ten years constructing from it a reputation the size of a pyramid, screaming to all the menagerie: “Be off with you, you stupid little beasts! What do you know? You know nothing and would know nothing without us! Have a reverential attitude toward us!” Another has fur made up of variegated, discolored little spots or patches. He constantly points with his front paws to his patches and spots: “Look! Here is the apotheosis of philosophy, aesthetics, logic, psychology, history, and criticism! Here everything is given concrete expression: the type of the subject, the ideal of the object, the absolute of contemplation, the indifference of humanity. . . .” Of all the beasts, this is the most spiteful; tiny—about the size of a squirrel, but his teeth—how sharp they are! He’s always gnawing nut shells—that’s his favorite food. Piles of gnawed shells are heaped around his burrow; bird, don’t fl y, beast, don’t walk past—don’t touch his shells! Or he’ll puff up and begin to scream! And his voice, oh, how piercing: not only our women’s ears but men’s too are unable to endure that scream. Even if you hold your ears, it’s still audible. A third species of pedantus lives in the hollow of an old rotted tree. Each of them gnaws, tirelessly gnaws its hollow, and gnaws it out almost to the bark; just the slightest wind and the whole tree topples over with a thud. But this is not a hardship for the beast. He simply moves to another tree and gnaws around that one as well. Mountains of sawdust are sprinkled around his tree stump. On a bright, warm day, when all the animals usually leave their burrows and run and gambol about, this little beast burrows in its sawdust up to its little snout and puffs and blows the dust to the wind. It’s a disaster to walk past—the sawdust will get into your eyes and you’ll be entirely covered with dust. You yourself will turn into a monster, like the pedant! It’s a deadly bore to describe them all! You can read about it for yourself if our zoology interests you. Several little beasts are mentioned in Linneus’s catalog. In Cuvier’s they suddenly multiplied . . . but now there are not only one
47 hundred or two hundred Russian little beasts—they’ve actually lost count. What will happen in the future? They simply make life impossible and not one human soul can get rid of them. Argumentatus, composed of raisonneurs,50 is a distinct genus. At fi rst sight they would seem to resemble pedantus but look more closely—they’re completely different. Pedant-beasts are rather playful, fi dgety, mischievous, although more malicious than a feral cat; but raisonneurs are awkward and sluggish. They barely move. Their souls are barely viable; but what am I saying? There are no souls in them whatsoever. Their voices drone on and on, tirelessly in the same tone: yesterday, today, tomorrow—it doesn’t change. If you unexpectedly encounter one, run away quickly—otherwise he will start to drone, get wound up, and keep droning at you until you hide from him; after such a meeting there will be such a buzzing in your ears that they will hurt for three days. The raisonneur-beast feeds on everything in the world. If he catches a locality, a castle, antiquity, an arsenal, love, an event, a joke, passion, character, malice, virtue, a rag, gossip, love affairs, he will rake everything to pieces, make a mess of it, throw it around, and when he has some handfuls, he’ll grab them at random, and also fl ing them at passersby. Linneus found only one species of argumentatus, the instructive; Cuvier as well; but in my opinion, there are three species of this genus: descrip- tive, narrative, and instructive; and all three are intolerable. Their distinctive trait is that they come out to hunt just at dusk so that you don’t notice that you’re bumping into them; nor do they, since they’re weak-sighted—that’s how you encounter them, but when they start to drone at you on one note and fl ing hand- fuls at you—it’s simply deadly! However, you have to give them credit—argumentatus is incomparably tamer than pedantus. I even intended to carry out careful observations on this. I haven’t yet had the time, but I think, I’m even sure from fl eeting, superfi cial opinions, which is the way that all the most important discoveries in the sciences are usually produced—that these little creatures can easily be added to Fauna domesticus. In terms of political economics, this would constitute an important and profi table item of husbandry. I say this because raisonneurs are far less wild and malicious than pedants: they are only intolerable and boring, and their breed is the most numerous; their rate of reproduction even threatens the pedant breed with extermination or neglect. The instructive is now the least populous species in the genus: the other two have completely driven the members of this species
48 back into a gorge, from which they only poke out their heads from time to time and whine. On the other hand, the other two, the descriptive and the narrative, are fully enjoying their supremacy. And for the most part they are merging into one species: and when dusk falls how they drone on—yes, each one drones on and on in its own way; and then in chorus . . . my friend, you certainly don’t want to hear such a concert! Phrase-mongerus—these little beasts comprise a strong genus. Recently, however, they have continued to multiply even more. For that reason they want to prove the antiquity of their origins as far back as Nimrodian51 beasts. I, how- ever, am prepared to help them with long citations and excerpts from Homer and Hesiod, not to mention Sophocles, Horace, Pindar, Virgil, Demosthenes, and Cicero, to trace their illustrious genus back to the fl ood. The phrase-mongering beasts—you will be amazed—are perfect monkeys. As soon as they see something new they immediately imitate it; but what they primarily imitate in mankind is only what is simple and easily understandable to them—a walk, a gesture, a mannerism, an accent—they mould themselves into it so artfully, that it is exactly as if they were born with that trait. Looking at them, you would think that they were the only creatures on earth—bustle, noise, petty rows, fuss, outcries—from morning to night their hands, feet, and tongues never rest. And what have they accomplished? Take a look—nothing. Their burrows are clean, light, spacious—little windows with rich curtains—their fl oors are all parquet. Everywhere are mirrors, magic lanterns,52 splendor, luxury, fads, and marvels! You’ll fi nd everything there—all the most artful cosmetics, acoustics, mechanics, and optics—they are all drenched in perfume, powdered, curled—all the latest styles, trinkets, chains, walking sticks, lorgnettes; you’ll fi nd every- thing at their places; and God forbid that you show up dressed informally, not in stylish clothes, they will immediately consign you to those who are out of favor and unworthy of attention. They are so affectionate and affable, so ingratiating, that when you remember that all this is simply artifi ce, a show, you’ll burst out laughing. When you meet them they’ll entertain you for an hour or two. It’s even amusing to be with them at fi rst; but as soon as you get into their circle, they’ll surround you like a wall and then there’s no escape; they’ll plague the life out of you with their phrase-mongering-singing. “But what are you struggling over, you buffoons?” you may ask them.
49 “Here, listen!” and they will perform: “Here’s my excerpt . . .” “A brand new tale . . .” “I have an historical . . .” “My fantastic . . . ” “This way—this way! Here is my humorous . . . ” “No, I have a vaudeville, such a vaudeville!” “And what about verse? . . .” “Listen, just listen!” You begin to listen, you listen attentively—the words are excellently chosen, playful, witty, and, it would seem, wise; in your imagination shadows seem to sparkle with a thousand images—one calls forth another, one chases another, they cling, they frisk, they play, they collide, they disperse . . . it looks as if something is there but when you’ve heard it to the end—everything has disappeared, there’s nothing there! In your head is noise, fatigue, emptiness; in your soul, boredom and melancholy. “Get away from me—let me go!” There are still many more large and small beasts of particular genuses but I fear I have already exhausted you with an endless zoology lecture. Farewell! Your friend, Aleksandra Zrazhevskaia Saint Petersburg Oct. 10, 1841
50 Answer to A. V. Zrazhevskaia’s Letter (A Short Course in Literary Zoology) Published in Maiak, no. 1, 184253
Why, as if I had disappeared And you didn’t know where I live, Did you take it into your head to write to Moscow, Through newspapers, through a journal? I sent you my complete address, 5 Not only the street and house number, But I even included the parish, As is the custom in old Moscow. From what countries, from what steppes, Did you send a published letter? 10 Where did you meet Such shaggy porcupines and wild beasts? And how they all rage at you! . . . But you didn’t frighten me; I don’t believe in monsters. 15 In vain you proudly do battle, Like Don Quixote with his dream, You set forth with military alarms To a War of Littérateurs, You cry: “To arms!”—You will not recruit me 20 Into your Amazon regiment! Such a home guard is laughable! Tell me, what kind of regiment will it be? When and where will you give battle? Believe me, you wrote 25 All these exclamations to me in vain; Could I really agree with you? I believe in Russian cordiality everywhere; And that a woman Should not be a registered54 poet, 30 Only with a visitor’s pass Should she enter the published world! Guests are welcomed and indulged; 51 I also have noticed on several occasions That they have spared us 35 Stern judgment and criticism in journals. Why exchange light occupations For labor and study? And you took it into your head to write About such strange desires to me, 40 Such proud words, When my head spins From punctuation marks; When the wisdom of periods and commas Is a touchstone to me;55 45 When verse is at odds with grammar In moments of inspiration! What do I care about Newtonian knowledge? Believe me, it is not our destiny; I beg you; allow us, if only from compassion, 50 To live as God has commanded. The reproach to our upbringing Is unjustifi ed; but the claims To glory are pitiful and laughable! Not everyone who wants to will be a genius; 55 Desire doesn’t ensure glory, And if wings have not been given to you, You will not be able to fl y up to forbidden heights; The entire earthly world seems Cold, melancholy, and unwelcoming 60 To the person who is dissatisfi ed with herself! By venerating the names Of the chosen ones, the world’s favorites, Klopstock, Dante, and Shakespeare, We will not rashly indulge 65 In sacrilegious dreams; Their great, diffi cult path is not for us, We are far from being able to compose their songs! Believe me, each person has been assigned his own path 52 By the will of God! 70 Let us go softly along it; If a thought comes to us, let us take up the pen; But free from journalistic arguments, Let us avoid literary discord! Write me simply, and by mail, 75 And without incomprehensible beasts, Even in unpublished letters; Leave journals aside, Spare me lettered debates, Paper abuse and battles 80 And the skirmishes of battling pens; They inspire deadly boredom in me! I don’t take part in them, And as with Spanish affairs,56 I always skip over them in journals! 85 Write so that I can read without tedium, As I did your former letters; But I confess, in your learning Your thought and style have grown heavy; Your literary zoology bored me! 90 With weariness I read it To the fi nal word Which I awaited like a holiday; And for the reader who is a stranger, Everything that interests us, 95 Doesn’t interest him in the least; And not having read your epistolary story, To the end in the pages of the journal, He will leaf through them as quickly as possible, Tell me, to whom is it interesting 100 To read about the unknown life of Unremarkable people! P. Bakunina Trans. Diana Greene
53 Notes My thanks to Irina Gordon, Anneta Greenlee, Lily Alexander, Dawn Lawson, Randall Spinks, and Susan Matthais for very helpful suggestions.
1. “The Menagerie” (“Zverinets”) appeared in Maiak, 1842 (t. 1, kn.1, gl. 1, 1-18), a conservative monthly journal, published in St. Petersburg from 1840–1845 by S. A. Burachok, Zrazhevskaia’s brother-in-law.
2. Varvara Bakunina (1773–1840), Zrazhevskaia’s godmother, a memoirist and travel writer, whose literary activity infl uenced Zrazhevskaia.
3. The books are her novel, Kartiny druzheskikh sviazei (Pictures of Friendly Relations, 1833, 1839), and the following translations: Mme de Girardin’s Le Lorgnon (1831), translated as Lornet (The Lorgnette, 1834); Balzac’s Louis Lambert (1832), translated as Sozertsatel’naia zhizn’ Ludviga Lamberta (the Contemplative Life of Louis Lambert, 1835); Charles Nodier’s Mademoiselle de Marsan (1832), translated as Devitsa de-Marsan, ili, posledniaia glava moego romana, (Miss Marsan, or, The Last Chapter of My Novel, 1838); C-H de Mirval’s L'ermite du Chimboraça, ou, Les jeunes voyageurs Colombiens (1837), translated as Pustynnik chimborazskii (The Chimboraco Hermit, 1838); Sophie Trémadeure’s Contes aux jeunes artistes (1836), translated as Detskaia biblioteka (The Children’s Library, 1840); three stories by Madame Charles (Henriette) Reybaud with the Russian titles “Amelia,” “Salvador,” and “Mshchenie” (Vengence) published under the title Tri povesti (Three Tales, 1841); and a long article by Fortunato Prandi, which Zrazhevskaia writes appeared in the Revue britannique, published under the title Ocherk novoi italianskoi literatury (An Outline of New Italian Literature, 1841).
4. Aleksandr Semenovich Shishkov (1754–1841), general, minister of education, president of the Russian Academy. Best known for his article denouncing the infl uence of French on the Russian language, “Rassuzhdenie o starom i novom sloge rossiiskogo iazyka” (Essay about the old and new style of the Russian language, 1803).
5. These and all subsequent ellipses are Zrazhevskaia’s. An ellipsis is a Romantic device, found in Russian as well as French, in which periods are “used to indicate interruptions or sudden breaks in thought” (The Chicago Manual of Style, 14th ed. [Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1993], 326, 347). An ellipsis can be ambiguous, since it also can be used to indicate that part of a text has been omitted. Zrazhevskaia, who took advantage of this ambiguity in her translation of Balzac’s Louis Lambert (see note 12), here, too, suggests that something has been omitted.
6. Jeanne Marie Bouvier de La Motte Guyon (1648–1717), Moyen court et très facile pour faire oraison, 1686. Zrazhevskaia cites the French title incorrectly.
7. Empress Mariia Fedorovna (1759–1828), wife of Paul I, who was assassinated in a palace coup in 1801; mother of the next two Russian tsars, Alexander I and Nicholas I.
8. The summer residence of the tsars, located outside St. Petersburg.
54 9. Vasilii Andreevich Zhukovsky (1783–1852), poet and translator, also tutor (1825–1839) of Mariia Fedorovna’s grandson, Alexander II, the liberator of Russia’s serfs.
10. Kartiny druzheskikh sviazei (Pictures of Friendly Relations, 1833), Zrazhevskaia’s epistolatory novel.
11. Mme de Girardin, one of the pennames used by the poet Delphine Gay (1804–1855) after her marriage to the publisher and journalist Emile de Girardin (1802–1881). Le Lorgnon is a satirical novel about a magic lorgnette that allows its possessor to see people’s true thoughts.
12. Histoire intellectuelle de Louis Lambert was the original title of Louis Lambert, a novel based on the philosophy of Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772). It was the Russian censorship that demanded Zrazhevskaia delete several passages from her translation. Zrazhevskaia responded by replacing all the censored passages with ellipses. The censorship then complained to Zrazhevskaia’s publisher, the Russian Academy, that she had done so “as if to excite the curiosity of the reading public.” In a deadpan response, Shishkov observed that while the ellipses might be construed as ambiguous, periods were not forbidden by the censorship, that many Russian works approved by the censorship had appeared with “periods and hyphens,” and that the Russian Academy certainly wouldn’t publish any “malicious” literature. A copy of Zrazhevskaia’s translation of Louis Lambert was found in Pushkin’s library. See M. Sh. Fainshtein, Pisatel’nitsy pushkinskoi pory (Leningrad: Nauka, 1989), 130–31, and his “Knigi A.V. Zrazhevskoi v pushkinskoi biblioteke,” Vremennik pushkinskoi komissii, no. 18 (Leningrad: Akademiia nauk, 1983), 152.
13. Before works from abroad could be translated into Russian and published, they had to be approved by the Russian censorship.
14. Published in France in 1832.
15. Praskov’ia Mikhailovna Bakunina (1810–1880), Varvara Ivanovna Bakunina’s daughter, a poet and prose writer.
16. “Groza,” published in Maiak, ch. 4 (1840): 33.
17. Zrazhevskaia criticizes Romanticism as “mocking everything good as ridiculous” (83) in her review, “Kuzma Petrovich Miroshev: Russkaia byl’ vremen Ekateriny II. Sochinenie M. N. Zagoskina.” Maiak, t. 3 kn. 5. (1842): 66–120.
18. Zinaida Aleksandrovna Volkonskaia (1789–1862), writer, and hostess of a famous St. Petersburg literary salon. See note 47.
19. Avdot’ia Pavlovna Glinka (1795–1863), known for her religious poetry.
20. Evdokiia Petrovna Rostopchina (1811–1858), who wrote poems refl ecting Russian women’s experience in society. In the 1830s and 1840s she was at the height of her fame.
55 21. Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock (1724–1803), perhaps best known for his infl uence on Goethe, as seen in Die Leiden des Jungen Werther (The Sorrows of Young Werther: 1774): “She [Charlotte] looked to the heavens, and at me; and I saw her eyes fi ll with tears, and she laid her hand on mine, saying, ‘Klopstock!’ I recalled at once the glorious ode she had in mind, and became immersed in the stream of emotions which she had poured over me by uttering this symbolic name. I could not bear it, I bent down over her hand and kissed it amid tears of utmost rapture.” Johann Goethe, The Sufferings of Young Werther, trans. Bayard Morgan (New York: Frederic Ungar, 1957), 38 (June 16).
22. E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776–1822), German writer, composer, painter, conductor, critic, lawyer, whose supernatural stories were very infl uential throughout Europe during the Romantic period. Johann Paul Richter (pseud. Jean-Paul, 1763–1825), German sentimental and humorous novelist whose works were very popular during the beginning of the nineteenth century.
23. C-H de Mirval, (pseud. of Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Champagnac, 1798–1858). Here Zrazhevskaia uses the fi rst initial of his actual name.
24. Son of Odysseus and Penelope who searches for his father in the Odyssey.
25. Zrazhevskaia also published this translation separately. Fortunato Prandi, Ocherk novoi italiianskoi literatury (1841).
26. Sophie Ulliac Trémadeure, Contes aux jeunes artistes (1839). In her Russian edition, Zrazhevskaia included her own introductory essay “Beseda s det’mi ob iziashchnom” (A Conversation with Children about the Beautiful).
27. Epic hero.
28. Battle of Nov. 26–28, 1812 in which Napoleon’s army, retreating from Russia, suffered extremely heavy casualties.
29. Rakhmannyi [N. N. Verevkin], “Zhenshchina pisatel’nitsa,” Biblioteka dlia chtenia 23, no. 281 (1837): 15–134. In the story, an inferior woman writer’s blind devotion to her career destroys her family, causing the deaths of her son and husband.
30. Georges Cuvier (1769–1832), French naturalist.
31. Here Zrazhevskaia uses the familiar form of “you” to address Bakunina.
32. Ornament or band worn on the forehead
33. Descartes corresponded with Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia (1618–1680) and Queen Kristina of Sweden (1626–1689). See Douglas Adeney, “Descartes and the Royal Women,” Proceedings of the Philosophy Women’s Committee (Melbourne: University of Melbourne Press, 1998).
56 34. Anna Petrovna Bunina, 1774–1828. First major Russian woman poet.
35. Refers to the nineteenth-century system of fi nancing book publication by collecting subscribers to the book in advance.
36. Avdot’ia Pavlovna Glinka (1795–1863), mentioned above. Her Zhizn’ presviatoi devy appeared in 1840.
37. Kniaz’ Skopin-Shuiskii, ili Rossiia v nachale XVII stoletiia (Prince Skopin-Shuiskii, or Russia at the Beginning of the Seventeenth Century, 1835), an historical novel by Olimpiada Petrovna Shishkina (1791–1854). In a review, Zrazhevskaia praised it as a more genuine, Russian alternative to the “tinsel” of Western Romanticism. “Kritika,” Maiak 1, (1842): 143–220.
38. The classically-educated Elizaveta Borisovna Kul’man (1808–1825) in her short life mastered Greek, Latin, Italian, French, German, English, Spanish, and Portuguese, and wrote classics- inspired poetry in Russian.
39. Pen name of Elena Andreevna Gan (1814–1842).
40. Mariia Semenovna Zhukova, Vechera na Karpovke (1838).
41. Nadezhda Andreevna Durova, 1783–1866. In her Zapiski kavalerist-devitsy (1836) Durova recounts how, dressed as a man, she fought against Napoleon in the Russian cavalry.
42. Aleksandra Osipovna Ishimova, 1805–1881, Istoriia Rossii v rasskazakh dlia detei (1837).
43. Pen name of Elizaveta Vasil’evna Kologrivova (1809–1884).
44. Pen name that Evdokiia Rostopchina (1811–1858) used in Utrenniaia Zaria: al'manakh na 1840 god, (Dawn: literary annual for 1840).
45. Karolina Karlovna Pavlova (1809–1893), now considered one of the best nineteenth-century Russian women writers.
46. Here Zrazhevskaia again directly addresses Bakunina with the familiar form of “you.”
47. Skazanie ob Ol’ge (The Legend of Olga) by Zinaida Volkonskaia (see note 18), an excerpt of which appeared in 1836 in Moskovskii nabliudatel’ (Moscow Observer) 9, 308–38. In 1829 Volkonskaia moved to Rome, perhaps because her sympathy with the Decembrist revolutionaries of 1825 and her increasing attraction to Catholicism (she later converted) made her persona non grata in Nicholas I’s Russia.
48. Torquato Tasso (1544–1595) author of Jerusalem Delivered (Gerusalemme Liberata) died a few days before he was to be crowned poet laureate by the pope. Zrazhevskaia might very well have been familiar with Goethe’s play, Torquato Tasso (1790) or Donizetti’s opera, Torquato
57 Tasso (1833).
49. Genesis 3:16.
50. Raisonneur, one who is argumentative. “Raisonneur se dit d’une personne qui fatigue, qui importune par de longs, par des mauvais raisonnements” (“Raisonneur” is said of a person who tires, who annoys with long, defective arguments). Dictionnaire de l’Académie française. 6th ed. (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1832–35).
51. Nimrod: Old Testament hunter, grandson of Ham, and great-grandson of Noah.
52. Early form of slide projector.
53. Appeared in Moskvitianin 1842 ch. 2 , no. 3, 15-17.
54. Bakunina, by using the word zapisynm (registered, confi rmed) implies the contrast between a dues-paying, registered member of a men’s club and a woman visiting the club. “Zapisat’sia v klub” means to join a club.
55. An allusion to Zrazhevskaia’s complex sentences, syntax, and punctuation in “The Menagerie.”
56. Refers to the protracted struggle for the Spanish throne, which started in 1833, between Isabel II, daughter of Ferdinand VII and Don Carlos, her uncle. Nicholas I’s government supported the more reactionary Don Carlos.
58 Center for Russian & East European Studies University Center for International Studies University of Pittsburgh 4400 W. W. Posvar Hall 320 S. Bouquet Street Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15260 (412) 648-8716 www.ucis.pitt.edu/crees/cbpaper.html.
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